[HN Gopher] Friendica - A Decentralized Social Network
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Friendica - A Decentralized Social Network
Author : janandonly
Score : 117 points
Date : 2026-04-05 10:41 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (friendi.ca)
(TXT) w3m dump (friendi.ca)
| mosaibah wrote:
| Mastodon gets all the attention but Friendica's federation story
| is actually broader, it speaks ActivityPub, Diaspora, and OStatus
| in the same node, so your contacts don't all have to be on the
| same protocol, that interop layer is undersold.
| amelius wrote:
| I guess that one day soon we will have a Claw that just pumps
| information between all the different social networks.
| nozzlegear wrote:
| Is that a good thing or a bad thing? I associate "claws" with
| bot spam but maybe it means something else.
| amelius wrote:
| You can use any technology for good and for bad.
|
| In this case, pumping around information so social networks
| appear to be one unified system is a good thing because you
| don't have to visit them all to check if there are new
| posts, etc. and you can avoid getting caught in an
| algorithm.
| imperfectfourth wrote:
| what's a Claw
| verdverm wrote:
| the "set it and forget it" Ai agents, largely driven by
| OpenClaw
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| Anyone who wants to do that doesn't need to use AI for it
| chromacity wrote:
| I'm increasingly unsure if this is something to aspire for. I
| make an effort to only follow people I know, and I turn off
| algorithmic feeds on social media, but it doesn't matter
| because the people I know routinely reshare made-up political
| bait and AI slop that's coming from the broader ecosystem.
|
| This sucks and there's no way to push back on that. First, if
| you do it too much, you're just a "reply guy" - you become a
| part of the same suckiness of social media that you're trying
| to push back against. Second, the near-universal reaction you
| get is "maybe these specific immigrants were not eating pets,
| but you gotta agree with my broader concern about immigration".
| This just an example, the reaction has its equivalent for all
| sides of the political spectrum. We just like to read stuff
| that aligns with our political identity and beliefs. The
| pursuit of truth is a distant second.
|
| I think that for social networks or forums to be at least
| somewhat healthy, they _need_ to be small, specifically to
| limit the interactions you have with complete strangers and
| content that doesn 't interest you at all. If you open up the
| ecosystem too much, it devolves into some flavor of Facebook.
| Morromist wrote:
| Yeah, I agree that small social networks are better. But some
| people are just bad at using social media - even if they're
| great people in other ways, so they share AI slop and made up
| political bait posts. You may have to curate your feed a bit.
| dokyun wrote:
| Mastodon spoke OStatus in the beginning as did GNUSocial and
| Pleroma before it, but EEE'ed it once it got big enough.
| OStatus isn't even relevant to fedi anymore, since there's only
| like one GNUSocial instance left and only a couple older
| Pleroma instances can still talk to it.
| kennywinker wrote:
| I'm interested in self-hosting a small social network for my
| family and close friends. Something to get us off
| facebook/instagram. If anybody is more familiar with the options,
| is this what you'd recommend?
| embedding-shape wrote:
| I have a forum I self-hosted for friends and family, they have
| their own login I gave them, it typically have 3-4 posts a week
| or something, at the very least one post from me as I have a
| "What I've been up to this week" thread. Seems to work out OK,
| and is probably as private as you can have something on the
| public internet.
| EGreg wrote:
| You could use this: https://github.com/Qbix/Platform
|
| Example: https://freecities.app
|
| Video demos: https://vimeo.com/1141492621/23e8b84b8b
|
| Disclaimer: I built it. Lovingly, over 15+ years.
| conception wrote:
| I tossed together a mattermost server. It's effectively a slack
| cove and works pretty great.
| throwanem wrote:
| It's been a decade, but I had a very similar experience with
| Mattermost. It would be, if perhaps not where I would end up
| today, then certainly where I would start looking.
| conception wrote:
| Yeah, it's been pretty seamless and I was able to import
| the full Slack history into it as well from a previous
| Slack instance. The only thing I found lacking was a good
| GIF plug-in, but I was able to cobble one together pretty
| easily.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| +1 for Mattermost. I set up mine for family but it's ended up
| mostly being used by my bots for reporting things to various
| channels via webhooks.
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| If you also want to host or build interesting social apps, you
| should definitely do an isolated atproto / Bluesky service!
| https://blueskydirectory.com/
|
| As for actually doing this... running a PDS and relay isn't
| that hard, and the red dwarf web client is online and can be
| configured to point to whatever appview you want. There's
| significantly less experience running your own appview, but
| there are options & folks are happy to help.
| kennywinker wrote:
| I've used bluesky, and it's very twitter-like. That doesn't
| seem like the best model for a close-knit community. For
| larger ones, perhaps!
| verdverm wrote:
| There are projects that make running independent atproto
| networks "easy": https://github.com/verdverm/testnet
|
| I no longer recommend ATProto, in part because the public by
| default was a terrible choice. People prefer privacy, not
| anyone in the world able to read all of their activity.
| Bolting permissioned buckets on after the fact is not the
| way, it needs to be core to the protocol design.
| kstrauser wrote:
| I'd recommend installing a Pleroma server. It speaks
| ActivityPub and you can use any of the nice Mastodon apps with
| it. I've run a Mastodon server for the last 9 years, and
| wouldn't recommend Pleroma over it for a large many-user
| instance, but it's relatively tiny and lightweight for a
| personal server. You can configure it not to talk to the rest
| of the Fediverse so that it remains your friendly, isolated
| silo.
| kennywinker wrote:
| Pleroma looks to be very twitter-y. I don't feel twitter is a
| great model for a small tight-knit group. For a larger less
| familial group, it's probably better suited.
|
| Like, i'm thinking photo album sharing (twitter-like makes
| photos ephemeral, quickly disappearing on the timeline) and
| conversation (twitter threading has never been strong imo).
| zimpenfish wrote:
| If you were going for a social-media-y experience, I'd not
| recommend Pleroma (or Akkoma which is the less problematic
| fork) because dealing with Erlang+Elixir is a massive pain
| in the arse. You'd want GotoSocial[0] (single binary,
| reasonably straightforward), snac[1] (haven't tried it but
| fedimeteo runs a whole bunch of instances successfully), or
| one of the other small servers (Takahe, bovine, etc.)
|
| [0] https://gotosocial.org
|
| [1] https://codeberg.org/grunfink/snac2
| kennywinker wrote:
| GoToSocial looks interesting, i will probably spin one up
| to try it out! Still seems a little twitter-like, but
| worth a shot.
|
| And as long as there is a docker container, i don't
| really care what language it's written in, tbh - tho that
| is sometimes useful as a signal of the code quality or
| other aspects
| eniac111 wrote:
| Heh, I've found this post while installing Gotosocial :D
| zimpenfish wrote:
| > as long as there is a docker container, i don't really
| care what language it's written in, tbh
|
| That's a good point that I keep forgetting these days.
| janandonly wrote:
| Let them all install Primal and run your own Nostr relay for
| the family.
|
| So long as they only connect to your relay, they only see each
| others messages and content.
|
| Primal also makes video and content sharing easy over Nostr.
| stevenicr wrote:
| Buddypress (free system that transforms free wordpress) - self
| hosted, is a reasonable option.
| rapnie wrote:
| When it comes to fediverse most ActivityPub servers focus on
| microblogging, and it is where interoperability works best.
| There are a number of good lists to consult. I would recommend
| checking projects for activity, quality, and governance,
| besides the features that matter to you, since "being part of
| the fediverse" is a moving target.
|
| https://delightful.coding.social/delightful-fediverse-experi...
|
| https://fedidb.com/apps
|
| https://fediverse.party/en/miscellaneous/
| interglossa wrote:
| I tried it sometime ago. I liked the interface but haven't found
| much of a community around it. It is very unfortunate that
| diaspora did not thrive earlier.
| swed420 wrote:
| Anybody have familiarity with Friendica to know how it stacks
| against the common pitfalls listed here?
|
| https://www.noemamag.com/the-last-days-of-social-media/
|
| Seems like it maybe suffers from the "fiefdom" / portability
| issue that other platforms struggle with, but I haven't looked
| closely.
| AnonyMD wrote:
| I tried to host this a few years ago, but it fell through because
| there wasn't enough documentation. I wonder if the documentation
| is more comprehensive now?
| adityamwagh wrote:
| Do we even need documentation with LLMs? :)
| ripvanwinkle wrote:
| The LLMs need documentation
| t-3 wrote:
| The LLMs might be able to put the mythical "the code is the
| documentation" into practice.
| virgil_disgr4ce wrote:
| This is one of the least convincing homepages I've ever seen. It
| doesn't help that there are no x margins at the largest media
| query. In fact nothing about this page encourages me to spend
| more than one second looking at it.
| prox wrote:
| It seems to be made for nerds (and I say that kindly) and not
| potential users. It's way too tech blurb and not enough show
| what you getting into.
| verdverm wrote:
| I think any federated social media that is going to replace
| the status quo needs to have solid (1) UX (2) privacy as the
| default
| mxuribe wrote:
| Wow, this is a blast from the past! I haven't touched nor done
| anything on Friendica since like 2014/2015! (Yes, this is one of
| the grand daddy of the original fediverse social platforms before
| the name "fediverse" was even a thing...like Gnu Social and
| status.net old!) Good on them that they're still going strong!
| ulrischa wrote:
| Finally one project with php and mysql that I can throw on a
| cheap shared hosting. No docker of node_modules fuckup
| HelloUsername wrote:
| Previous discussion in 2018:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16763779
| sunaookami wrote:
| Discourse around social networks hasn't changed one bit huh
| wizardforhire wrote:
| "Military grade encryption"...???
|
| What does this even mean? I've scoured the website, their wiki,
| their faq, the past hn convo... too no avail!
|
| A substitution cypher was considered "military grade" for
| millennia
| IFC_LLC wrote:
| Sadly, but the whole buzz about social networks is built around
| the community. And any of federated networks require some
| technical knowledge that is over the head in 99% of regular
| users.
|
| I wish this could be a bit more user-friendly, like p2p
| networking that does not require any user configuration, just
| install a client and it will p2p automatically.
| kkfx wrote:
| I've tested WriteFreely, Mastodon, Nostr, ... but all lack the
| basic to succeed IMVHO:
|
| - being a single, simple application, without much deps, maybe
| go-get-able, pip-able, cargo build-able etc, WF actually is one
| of them
|
| - offer a platform, meaning a blog, comments per posts,
| distributed identity, optional chat
|
| We have many different projects who do so, but not a single
| integrated one.
|
| Nostr is good for the infra, have a sufficiently complete relay
| (Haven) and a future one a bit more complete (MOAR), but lack a
| built-in client and a decent chat support (0xchat is nice, and
| very hard to deploy in a sovereign manner).
|
| WF is nice but limited as a blog and have no comments
|
| Matrix is nice for chatting, with a very complex audio/video
| support, with very little documentation, I manage to get it
| running, with LiveKit as well, but it's a pain. XMPP is even
| worse because it lack a complete client for all platforms and
| it's very touchy on DNS setup.
|
| The defunct ZeroNet was very nice to host personal websites
| without a domain name and also behind NAT, but offer nothing
| ready made to use with it.
|
| ...
|
| Long story short we have the wrong tech stack underneath. We need
| to rediscover the old Xerox model of the OS as single integrated
| app, where anything can be combined at the user will, with ease.
| Emacs/LispM do better pushing anything in the config instead of
| relaying on a live image. But that's what we need. We have one
| mind, we need to combine out digital companion.
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(page generated 2026-04-05 23:00 UTC)