Getting to know Friendica
An overview of the fediverse alternative to Facebook
Friendica is part of the fediverse
The open source community has created a number of social media applications that offer similar capabilities as large mainstream social media. Many of these open source applications share one or more common way to communicate which allows users of one of the apps to follow users on another application - or on a different server running the same application. The collection of all these applications, running independently and communicating between each instance is called the Fediverse.
Some alternatives to mainstream social media apps:
Instead of X (FKA Twitter) one might choose Mastodon, Misskey, Pleroma or Bluesky which is not part of the fediverse but is an alternative to X / Twitter.
Instead of YouTube one might choose PeerTube
Instead of Instagram one might choose PixelFed
Instead of Facebook one might choose diaspora, Hubzilla, or Friendica.
There is also an app called Funkwhale which is an audio streaming social network.
The diagram blow depicts the apps above and more - as well as how they all communicate with each other.
An alternative to Facebook
Friendica is a fediverse application that offers many of the same features as Facebook - and more. Friendica was first released in July 2010 and has matured into a feature-rich application over the years. Friendica provides the following high-level capabilities:
Post long-form richly formatted content
Follow others on any other fediverse app as the diagram above demostrates
Create and follow groups (alumni organizations or community groups for example)
Publicize and coordinate events
a unified calendar view of all the events that have been shared with you - including others birthdays (permission based)
a robust permissions model
highly customizable profile page and interface look and feel
Friendica is not a single app hosted by a large corporation. There are thousands of friendica instances hosted independently around the globe. All of these instances are capable of communicating with each other so it is possible to “friend” or “follow” someone who has their account on a different friendica server. In fact you can follow and interact with accounts on any application in the diagram above. In this sense it is like having your Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, and Reddit accounts all integrated into a single feed. Don’t worry though - you don’t have to consume all of this through a single feed. Friendica allows you to view by protocol or application. It also allows you to group all the accounts you follow into “circles” so that you can view activity associated with groups of people you know in a single feed without being distracted by the posts of all the other folks you know.
Friendica gives you the ability to choose how you want to interact with social media in the moment.
Here is a screenshot of my latest activity feed and from the icons in the upper-right corner of each post you can see that I have activity in my feed from Mastodon and Bluesky in addition to activity from friendica.
I can look at a the global feed and click on a trending tag (or search for any arbitrary tag) to see activity related to that tab. In the image below the global feed is filtered for the keyword #trump. If I wanted to save this search all I would need to do is click the large icon with the plus sign. I am not following Laffy so I would not have found that in my personal feed. This is a good way to find like-minded (or non-like-minded) individuals that you might choose to follow based upon their posts.
The image below shows my network feed which can be filtered by a single-click on any of the items in the left-hand column. Here I am viewing my “Friendica Admin Related” circle. This circle contains only folks that I have followed because I’ve gotten value from their posts on the topic. With a single click I could switch from this content to “all the folks I follow on Bluesky” by clicking on the word “Bluesky” in the “Protocols” drop-down.
What is not like Facebook
While there are many similarities between friendica and Facebook there are some notable differences:
There is not a team of developers that track your behavior on the site and across the Internet so they can sell your data and make revenue by targeting you with advertising.
There is not an algorithm determining what to place in your feed (or what NOT to place in your feed)
Your friendica feed contains items shared by your contacts and items that contain the tags that you specify.
You are in control - not Facebook
If you would like to begin your fediverse journey by creating a friendica account on a server that I maintain click the button below to learn more.