This is good growth for such a smaller lesser known fedi project that replaces Facebook.
The tough part about something like Friendica is that it’s usefulness very dependent on how many of your friends are on it. You’d need a group of friends to all join together for it to stick.
No official Android and iPhone apps => no users.
I’ve been looking for a Facebook alternative. It was either Diaspora or Friendica.
Is Friendica more popular? What are some of the most popular/stable instances with the lowest chances of disappearing?
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Diaspora* only supports diaspora protocol. It has about a few thousands MAU I’d say. If you use it you can interact with Diaspora* users and with Friendica/Hubzilla users from servers that have the diaspora addon. You can see a list of Diaspora* pods here.
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Friendica on the other hand natively supports ActivityPub, and has addons for BlueSky, Diaspora* and Tumblr (Not all servers have them enabled). It has 3k MAU, but you can communicate with much wider range of folk. There’s also the Friendica directory, allowing you to find interesting folk to follow much more easily. If you want a stable instance I can recommend https://friendica.world/ , it’s managed by the admins of lemmy.world .
Thanks. Yeah after further considerations I went with Friendica. And yes I created my account on Friendica.world also. I think it has a better shot at surviving. But we never know. It takes one fuck-up and everything could go to shit.
I would have recommended you mine or venera.social. They’re around 10 years old or something, so quite some time. But they’ve temporarily closed signups. nerdica.net and anonsys.net have also been around for quite some time, although the former had some problems last year and lost years of database. ouch.
Then there’s social.trom.tf, which has some of the most wonderful custom themes I’ve seen on Friendica, but their opinions on stuff are a bit weird for me…
For the rest I don’t know that much.
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whats the best queer friendly instance so far that actually bans/defederates from bigots?
genuine question so i can join
I had a Friendica account like 10 years ago. Kinda sad to hear it’s only 2.500 active users.
Requiring people to create an account just to see anything is a sure way to immediately drive off any potential new users.
It happens the same on Facebook, so that’s not a problem for a Facebook alternative
If your bar for a good site is “it’s as good as Facebook”, you should raise your standards.
It is a Facebook alternative, after all. But now that you’re speaking, I think it would work if a link to the community page would be visible straight from the login page. You can still see the public feed as of speaking, but you have to go to
instance.address/communityto see it.Edit: seems like this is not a universal issue with Friendica, but rather just something to add to the Frio theme which is the default for the majority of the instances. For example, where the Vier theme is used by default, there is a community button available: social.outsourcedmath.com/ is one example.
Hopefully someone does a more modern theme that has this button too.
It is a Facebook alternative
Yes, alternative. Why would you want an alternative? Because you’re unhappy with it.
You can still see the public feed as of speaking, but you have to go to instance.address/community to see it.
That’s great except there’s no way to know that by the home page.
I did not receive your response in time, that’s why I edited my previous comment. Sorry about that.
Imo, I’m more concerned about Facebook’s data hoarding practices and its future moderation practices than whether it has a public feed or not. LinkedIn and VK (probably G+ either, can’t remember) - other two social networks that are more similar to Facebook in UI - do not have publicly accessible feeds either on their home pages, yet they still managed to get plenty of users. Probably no longer still relevant, but diaspora is also featured as the 1st alternative to Facebook. Yet if you go to any diaspora server, say diaspora-fr.org/, there’s no way to access a public feed either.
Some Friendica servers (probably some Mastodon servers too) are also actively blocking their local feeds from unlogged users, so that’s also an aspect to keep in mind.
I understand that for some people (I simply don’t care that much about this aspect, but I understand you do), the lack of a public feed might be an impediment, but I think it’s way less harmful than other things that Meta does to its users.
my 2c
Isn’t that what you want for a Facebook replacement though?
I guess being able to browse public profiles and posts would be good, but if it’s like Facebook then wouldn’t most people be using their real names and posting about semi-personal IRL stuff?
You’d want that stuff to only show for your friends, and maybe friends of friends
I mean you could use totally fake and made up profiles, I just want to see what the UI looks like and maybe literally anything about the site and how it works?
Let’s hope that there are also a few organisations that run Friendica instances so that the offer becomes a bit bigger. In the last two years, everyone has been totally fixated on Mastodon and many have opened a Mastodon server without realising that there were other options.
I’d like to use it on iPhone but no app as far as I can tell
It’s compatible with the Mastodon API, so you can use those apps.
not really
Perhaps not all, but there are a number that do work.
Mastodon app, android an error (missing parameters) for Friendica servers as well…
Blame Apple. They’re the ones requiring people to get proprietary paid accounts for the privilege of distributing software for their shitty devices.
At some point one more is too many
