Just curious. Have you had trouble loading my-place.social?

They never explained well how to use Friendica, so it’s all guessing. But, I believe, to get a Facebook-like experience, you mark people as “Friends” who you want in a Facebook-like environment. This maps to “Friends” on Facebook. Then you click on the “Friends” circle, and you only see posts and conversations from your friends.

You can also set up groups that federate to other instances, and you can control access to the groups. I’ve never used it, so I don’t completely understand how to do this.

But, I think these are the 2 closest Friendica features for Facebook emulation.

https://wiki.friendi.ca/docs/groups-and-privacy#groups_and_privacy

and

The stalls are because the database queries are suboptimal. There is one that occasionally runs that, on my instance (I have 337 active users), can sometimes run for 15 minutes and will lock tables. Everything stalls and backs up.

This query was discussed, and I believe in the next release (but unsure) it will be replaced. Instead of using a ton of “not in” clauses, it does a left join now. In testing, someone mentioned it went from multi minutes to multi seconds to run. But there are a lot more such queries.

I think what Friendica needs desperately is a MariaDB/MySql expert to clean up the queries.

Because Friendica supports groups, you can connect to Lemmy communities. This is what kills Freindica. It just cannot handle the hundreds of thousands of daily connections that come in just from lemmy.world alone. Basically, it then becomes a Lemmy/Piefed/MBIN instance plus a Mastodon instance. The database grows by leaps and bounces, queues back up, and it stalls. CPU pegs without relief.

On mine, I finally had to block the Lemmy User Agent at the Cloudflare firewall. I calculated I would have had to spend another $500/month to allow the server to handle the Lemmy traffic comfortably, excluding the continuing cost for DB space. So far, I haven’t blocked Piefed and MBIN, but this could change.

Friendica groups were designed for small private groups or specialized groups. Not public forums. I don’t think they ever anticipated someone connecting to Lemmy.world communities and that such groups would become so active. I’ve told people on my instance that if they want to connect to these groups, they should use Piefed/Lemmy/Mbin, not Friendica.

I haven’t looked at the code, but it’s standard PHP so probably not terribly hard for PHP developers to get involved.

The developers still work on it, are active in the support groups, and answer questions, but they just can’t put in the time they used to. I’m sure they’d be happy if someone wanted to get involved. But, I don’t think it would need to be taken over, just helped.

It’s an acquired taste. Now that I’ve been using it for months, I prefer it. I like that I have my Bluesky and Tumblr posts completely integrated into my timeline. I can reply to Bluesky posts. When I post something, it automatically gets posted to Bluesky, and Tumblr, if I like. I never go onto Bluesky any longer. Likes and replies from Bluesky are right in with my Mastodon posts and RSS feed posts too. Yes, RSS integrates in as well (obviously you can’t reply to them though).

On Mastodon, if someone posts something interesting and I want to see replies and discussions, I can’t, unless I remember to go back to the post and look. In Friendica I can click that I want to follow the thread, and it will notify me of the updates, and take me right to the new comment when I click it, it takes me directly to the notification. I love this! If I interact with a post (like it), same thing. It will track it for me. And it does a better job of pulling in replies and responses from all over.

Yeah. Not all good.

I run one of the Friendica servers and it’s a problem child. The database grows rapidly and struggles. The database queries urgently need work. Some are super slow. It stalls a lot. The UI is confusing. The developers are not all that active any longer, but still active. The UI is, well, dated.

More info about it here: https://news.elenarossini.com/the-future-of-social-is-here-a-show-and-tell-part-3-friendica/

The downvotes and karma do not stop you from saying whatever you want. It just means you have to say it somewhere else. Hence, you are not censored.

This is fantastic news!

This many be true. But, if so, it must not be considered an important issue by more than 50% of the people because it isn’t factoring into their votes.

Yep, it’s enabled now on https://feddit.online/

It’s amazing that a company can get public officials to sign an agreement making it illegal for them to give any information to their electorate about a project that would have a huge impact on them in every possible way. No elected official should ever sign such an agreement. Why would they? But, they did. Corruption is the only reason I can think of.

And why is there no law against elected officials agreeing to become agents of a corporation against the interest of the electorate? Same answer, probably.

But all these people were elected by the ones they are hurting. And the electorate most likely elected their leaders based on some emotional non-existent issues instead of picking leaders based on commitment, honesty, competency, and a desire to help people. From what I see from the rest of the country, and we are talking about Alabama here, they may have gotten the government and outcome that they deserve and are actually responsible for their own problem. I think American voters are bringing all of this personal damage upon themselves.

I’m a disillusioned American, by the way.

Coincidentally, there’s this post today about Yunohost: https://my-place.social/display/db471d1f-c06c03be288f78d7-ad573aef

@_elena@mastodon.social

Elena Rossini, well known for her help in growing the Fediverse, raves about Yunohost, https://news.elenarossini.com/my-year-of-fediverse-explorations/. You should be fine using it.

@_elena@mastodon.social

Jerry’s post says he blocked 2 others. Other than lemmy.ml, what were the other 2?

The key word here is “connected” instances. You don’t find hashtag-related posts from all the servers, just the servers that your server is connected to and also only posts that your server has seen from other servers.

This is why, on my instance, I relay with over 300 other instances, some of them are the larger ones. All the posts they see on their server are duplicated onto my smaller server. The impact is that while my server is small, it has the same messages as one of the large servers which makes for a better experience. Note that Mastodon.social does not relay with any other instance. Not that most instances could possibly hold all their posts and accounts anyway.

When I search for hashtags on my instance, I do get a lot of hits.

Many smaller servers do not relay as much as I do, or at all, because it requires disk space to store all the posts, images, and accounts that are streaming in constantly from all these other servers. I don’t have these concerns because I have unlimited capacity. So, the experience will vary depending on which server your account is on.

You have to use hashtags on Mastodon if you want your messages to be seen because there is no AI to fill timelines. People follow hashtags and search for them. Then you’ll get likes and boosts.

And, you control your own timeline by following hashtags, following people, and searching for hashtags. This way, unlike Twitter, your timeline only has posts that you are interested in. Once you get this set up, it’s quite nice to only see posts that you like reading, without advertising and without posts meant to enrage you.

Also you can use https://fedi.directory to find great people to follow.