It seems like it should be sort of a priority for the fediverse to create a high quality alternative to Facebook, which is one of the largest platforms out there, and probably what a lot of people think of when they think of “social media”, and yet, the marketing and overall adoption of Friendica is simply abysmal, to put it bluntly.
Issue 1: The super bland and basic on-boarding.
When you visit the main website for friendica, you are greeted with “friendica: a decentralized social media network” followed by a “try it” button. Then when you scroll down, there is basic black text on a white background, explaining things like decentralization, privacy, and interoperability. Do you think that this sort of intro is really going to draw people in? It gives off the vibe of “it is your birthday”, a la dwight from the office.
If you click on the “try it” button, you get scrolled to a part of the site that says “Try Friendica” with two sentences that basically say “this website is really complex overall, but don’t worry, you can click another button below to browse a list of servers (yes, servers, we are not explaining what that means, just click the button)”. The actual server list has a single filter option, language, and if you filter by english, the top server right now is a furry server. If any normie has somehow managed to get this far, they are sure to nope the fuck out at this point.
Assuming you do manage to get past this point, the actual sign up form has way too much information for the average person. The first field is “openID”. I’m sure that’s useful for those who use it, but why is it the first field? There is also a check box to be added to the public directory, which is checked no by default. What does this mean? It is certainly not explained here. You’re not asking for a password? Why not? Oh, because you are making a random password for me I have to copy and paste and then save or change. That’s not inconvenient at all. Yet another step of friction for me.
Compare this on-boarding process to other sites on the fediverse. Mastodon has a catchy and succinct explainer on why their site is worth joining followed by a “join mastodon.social” button, or a “pick another server” button. If you go to the servers button, you get several different filtering options, region, interest, sign up process, legal structure, and very notably, a disclaimer that all of these servers have signed a safety agreement. Upon signing up, you first agree to some terms of service, which is very reassuring for those looking for a safe and welcoming platform, followed by entering username, e-mail, password and date of birth. All very straight forward. Lemmy is similarly streamlined and polished, and you don’t even need an e-mail to sign up for some servers. Super easy and convenient.
Issue 2: Terrible mascot.
Mastodon has their mastodon carrying a knapsack. Lemmy has the lemming face. Pixelfed has a cute red panda. Friendica has…some kind of demented looking rabbit with bugged out eyes? Seriously, what the hell is this?
Issue 3: Super basic blog style website.
As alluded to in issue 1, the website is super basic, with almost no polish to it. It looks like someone made it on wordpress. The home page does have some clip art type images and background stuff thrown in here and there, but outside of that, it looks very unprofessional. Again, comparing to sites like Mastodon and Lemmy, which have much more polished and professional looking web design. The clearly put time into making sure new users get a good impression. Friendica puts almost no effort whatsoever.
So these three issues, just from an outsiders glance, are in my opinion some of the biggest things holding back what could potentially be one of the most used sites on the fediverse, at least on the marketing side of things. I do not know how the overall team behind the site is structured, but suffice to say, it needs work.
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My complaint about Friendica is that it just doesn’t actually seem to do the part of Facebook that I actually want. At least not very well. I don’t want to see news, current events, memes and crap in that feed. I want to see posts and pictures from IRL friends, life updates, event organization, interest groups, etc. With privacy settings so only actual friends you want see the posts.
In its current state Friendica seems to just be a skin over mastodon, with some alpha stage friend features.
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
It almost seems like it is too flexible. Like, it pulls in posts from all over, which is interesting and cool. But do people join a site like Facebook to see random posts from everywhere, or do they join it to see posts from their friends?
Lemmy is good because it is a closed ecosystem. It doesn’t take in posts from every site on the fediverse. That’s not to say that it should not be an option on Friendica, but it should definitely not be the default view. Which is definitely a part of what also drives people away when they try it, I think. They don’t know how to connect with their friends, and just end up connecting with lots of random people. The fact that “list in directory” is checked no by default doesn’t help either. It seems like it almost tries to make it hard to connect with people you know.
Maybe i’m missing something but lemmy absolutely shows mastodon posts. It depends on if someone uses the handle of the group or not.
Yeah, it feels like its all supposed to be there. But without getting any of my actual friends to make an account, its hard to test any of it out. Though the bigger issue right now is that it seems my instance (friendica.world) is down or dead. The list of other instances is also struggling to load for me.
Just curious. Have you had trouble loading my-place.social?
I just tried it. Seems to be fine for me. Just brought me to a login screen.
I do agree with that assessment. I feel like it almost just needs to be rebuilt from the ground up, with that specific focus in mind. A new site all together might be the best way to go.
What fedi app has good marketing? Mastodon gets a little visibility, but largely its marketing seems to be trying to talk to people already on fedi. They need to talk to people who aren’t here, and sell the positives more than hitting on the negatives of the negatives of the corporate sites.
As to friendica, I signed up on an instance and played with it a bit. I liked it, but it didn’t feel like a replacement for Facebook. What it reminded me of most was LiveJournal from years ago. Something about the early 2000s website design ethic, I guess.
I originally saw this post on reddit, then saw the thread had been brought here too. As I said over there, I LOVE Friendica for the Bluesky, Mastodon (etc), Tumblr, WordPress, and RSS integration. I wish I could recommend it to my non-tech friends trying to escape Facebook, but I can’t yet. They’d go crazy with the random freezes and errors. And the UI has some rough spots. But for me, it has become my primary browser tab for social media.
Its great for nerds.
It’s time for people to become tech literate if they want what they want. Consolidation has been a negative on the learning aspects for too long, and they are setting right back in their ways once they discover some work is needed to break free. The want everything with zero compromise. That’s what got us here! lol
Don’t want to shout too much about this yet as it’s still super early but I am actually working on a new fediverse app that I plan should be covering the same sort of use cases as Lemmy, Mastodon and Friendica, all in one application. With a big focus on user friendliness, easy onboarding and such.
It’s still super early but drop me a private message if you’re interested in helping or just hearing more.
Hi, I’d be interested in learning more about your project to create a new Fediverse software.
I want to be honest: I don’t have much faith in the success of your project and I’ll explain why.
- very successful projects like Mastodon show great difficulty in improving, because they were born to be too simple, set up to do minimal microblogging, and then grew together with their user base;
- very long-lived projects like Friendica, have had even more difficulty in improving because they were born to be very complex,
- projects that have had a great marketing push like Pixelfed, continue to be (in my opinion) very modest;
- forumverse (or threadverse) projects like Lemmy have received the main damage precisely from the incompatibility wanted by Mastodon against them;
- new very interesting projects like Bonfire (the only software together with Friendica and Hubzilla to manage the “circles”) are being developed with difficulty and are made up of many modules and above all do not have a decent app.
- a brilliant developer like the one who created Kbin has created a wonderful software, but due to the enormous success it had all the Kbin instances went haywire, he was unable to keep up with the support requests and disappeared forever from circulation after a month of burnout
- even the best software in the Fediverse is useless if there is no smartphone app and not all the software in the Fediverse can be managed with an app
Finally, the impression I had is that even among the most famous developers of the Fediverse there is a bit of ignorance about Activitypub, about other platforms and about how other developers have solved the same problems; also it seems that the “Masters of the Fediverse” are always in a bad mood and have less and less desire to learn new things (a praiseworthy exception is Matthias Pfefferle).
Creating a federated software is therefore not a very simple thing neither technically nor psychologically, but if you feel capable of doing it, perhaps it could be advisable to test yourself a bit:
- developing some web utilities, some plugins or less ambitious projects
- actively contributing to other existing projects (Friendica? Bonfire?)
- getting familiar with both the Mastodon API (which is an industry standard) and with the development and definition of APIs in general: when someone wants to write an app for your software, they will look at your code and in two minutes they will decide if it is worth doing!
Of course I didn’t tell you these things to depress you, but only to point out some things that are often not foreseen: in reality I hope that your idea can become a fantastic project!
Good luck!
If you’re not creating it to push propaganda I’d be willing to donate to a project like that.
Where do you place “be kind to each other” on the propaganda scale?
Propaganda is definitely not on the list of planned features, haha :)
Appreciate the sentiment, I hope it will one day be worthy of donations :)
While i definitely agree, none of this is a deal breaker for me. What is a deal breaker is this: I am on my third Friendica account now because the first 2 instances both started struggling and then collapsed. The one I’m on now is suddenly running very slow, just like the first 2 before the end. It seems to me like maybe they’re kinda hard to run?
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.
Thanks for this comment! It really explains exactly why Friendica is struggling.
Is a real shame as IMO events (and groups) are really important to get a critical mass of adoption in Fedi. I look at sites like Allevents.in which allow people to submit but most of their event data is scraped from FB. We need Fedi instances which make searching events easy. So many groups and individuals and organisations feel unable to leave FB because they can’t see anywhere else to tell people about events, at the moment that is pretty true. But it needs to be an allrounder site, not an event specialist site.
But not being able to connect to busy Lemmy communities would mean Friendica isn’t an ideal allrounder, and even if the Friendica instance got big and has very busy groups, it would have issues.
I hope that these issues get solved!
(just a placeholder for my usual rant about how federation is the wrong unit for scaling social media)
You’re the third person I’ve heard this from. Seems marketing is not the only issue.
Every Friendica instance I tried had issues with extremely slow performance and complete nonresponsiveness.
I even tried Friendica.world because Ruud knows what he is doing, but it ran pretty bad too.
Thank you, and yes, Friendica.World is still having issues. I even created a separate community for it: https://lemmy.world/c/friendicaworld
Yeah just signed up, and tried to share it with friends and so far I got no friends or whatever I am suppose to get.
Idk if it was friendica or lemmy but the space filled up hella fast, friendica needed constant restarts like once a week, ideally daily, or it lagged and you couldn’t login or do anything. Was Hosting both, but noped out.
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/
Forgive my ignorance as I am not a developer, but how hard would it be for a new development team to take it over? I know that open source software is a collaborative process, but it feels like most of the biggest fediverse platforms have dedicated teams that drive it. What exactly happened that led this one to fizzle out? What would it take to get another one engaged? Or would it just be a start from scratch type situation?
I do agree that the functionality is pretty good, if not a bit wonky at times. I’ve heard those hosting servers discuss how hard it is to keep an instance running smoothly.
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.
I looked at the code recently. It’s really good, way better than the UI made me expect.
“The proof is in the pudding” as they say.
I assume the root problem is a near complete lack of money to make Friendica polished, or user friendly, or full of great features, or well-known. If it’s a tiny team who may have other jobs, then it’s hard to imagine it getting better.
True, but then why have Mastodon and Lemmy been able to make it work? I’m not sure about Lemmy, but I know Mastodon is a non-profit that has a paid development staff. What is stopping friending from following a similar model? Do they just not care enough about it to try to pursue it full time? I do know there are grants and different types of funding structures for fediverse projects, but I do see how funds can be a limiting factor. For me, it seems more of a matter of passion and dedication. I could be wrong about that though.
Mastodon is a modest, minimal and deliberately limited social network, managed by a staff that doesn’t care about the Activitypub standard and compatibility with other software in the Fediverse; Lemmy is not a social network (users can’t “follow” other users) and this allows it to be a bit lighter to manage, as it doesn’t have to take into account the network it would create between all the nodes.
Friendica on the other hand is a masterpiece of interoperability (it was born to manage different protocols: Activitypub, DFRN, diaspora*, RSS, OSStatus; it has connectors for Bluesky and Tumblr and provided connectors for Facebook and Twitter) and integration (it manages practically all Activitypub objects except polls); it manages groups better than any software that isn’t Reddit-like and has its own APIs, while integrating Mastodon’s APIs (and the Raccoon for Friendica app has improved the interface a lot also thanks to the inspiration of the Lemmy app); allows for advanced features and automation directly from its interface.
Unfortunately, the graphic design is outdated, the ergonomics are anything but friendly (my favorite slogan is “Friendica is not friendly…”), and the queries are a fucking problem, but we are talking about something that has no equal in the Fediverse, and never will unless Bonfire manages to emerge from its current chrysalis of an autoerotic concept.
However, you can’t compare the complexity of Friendica to systems like Mastodon or Lemmy.
I think it’s simply because more people use mastodon and lemmy, so there’s more incentive to work on them, and there are a lot more contributors to development.
Sounds like they’re lacking UI, UX people on their team, along with someone good at marketing, and money overall.
I could help with marketing and fundraising, but at the very least the UI and branding would have to be fixed first. I guess if the team was contacted if they’d like a person to fix up the onboarding process and an artist to help make a new mascot I know one who would do it. Actually what would be better would be 2 mascots, to go with the whole “making friends” motif.
Sign up definitely needs to be by interest after going through language, since you’re right that the first option would totally nope most people out.
I tried to love it. It’s one of the most feature rich fediverse platforms out there. It has groups built in out of the box, it talks to Diaspora as well as Activitypub… But it’s just… not nice to use.
Add to that the butt ugly blue and yellow icon from the 90’s.
Diaspora had it going on I found. It’s a shame it didn’t catch on. And that they didn’t adapt it to ActivityPub.
It was made back when Facebook had that old style UI, in 2010. And then interest in Facebook’s format kinda died, and so did the interest in the project.
For sure. It basically just comes across as a Temu version of the Facebook logo.
Link for anyone interested:
Based on the post, I was expected the website to look far worse.
- I agree the onboarding isn’t great and could use an overhaul.
- Had to specifically look search for the mascot (didn’t see it on the website) and yeah, that’s rough (starting from scratch may not be a bad idea). Flaxy O’Hare
- The screenshot also showed a pretty basic UX that could look far better.
I guess in conclusion, I think all your points are valid.
Edit: numbered items and added missing link.
The website is not bad as far as websites for open source software go, but for a social media site, it is honestly one of the worst I have ever seen.
I tend to agree. I think that even though it might seem a little harsh, it’s also pretty important to be brutally honest and realistic about things like this. Maybe consider sending this feedback to the developers (in a constructive way, of course).
edit:
I wanted to add that I think the name ‘Friendica’ is a really good one, and I like what they have going on. I have heard good things about it in general, despite the dated design/style elements.Totally, the name and overall functionality is decent, and I actually do enjoy using it once I figure out how. It just needs a bit of a face lift and overall marketing rework.
I stopped using facebook years before fediverse even existed.
I think the facebook public is not the same as the fediverse public.
The most developed fediverse apps are the ones that clone sites that the geeks used to roam, like twitter and reddit.
When people develope something like this, usually is because themselves want to use it. I would assume that, like me, not many people want to use a facebook-like site.
Maybe not within the “geek” world, but Facebook is one of if not the largest social media platform out there. So I am not sure it’s quite accurate to say “not many people” want to use a site like that. I know for a fact a lot of my friends would join one of an alternative existed.
The growth mindset that is intrinsic in questions and comments like this is counterproductive to the goals of the fediverse in my opinion.
The goal of federated services is not to be the biggest anything in the world. But instead to give places for people who actually care about the quality of The contents they interact with and that it was created by humans.
If that means that this part of the grand scheme of media stays small… So be it.
I don’t really care about the size overall. What I care about is whether my friends are on it or not. That’s why Facebook is great, because you can literally find anyone and everyone (for the most part). Looking for that person you knew back in high school, or a cousin? They are likely on there. Want to find musicians? There are lots of groups in your area that people go to very often to find other musicians. Want to find people to play D&D? Join a d&d meetup group for your area.
Nothing about a federated site precludes any of that from being possible. It may make it somewhat more tricky, since searching between instances can be a bit wonky, but it is very doable. I think the fact that different instances can connect between each other makes things seem bigger than they actually are. You can be on a one person instance, but still be able to connect with everyone else on the entire fediverse. So overall, size is generally irrelevant, other than building a network effect, which I think is very important for any social media site to succeed.
The mascot argument seem like cherry picking. I completly agree about the two other points
It’s part of an overall image. I know it seems minor, but when the sign up is janky, the website is janky, then you somehow get a janky error with some bizarre looking rabbit, it just adds to the pile of things that might make people think it’s amateur hour.
and
That second one is actually pretty good. The first one needs to die in a fire.
