Is friendi the only one? I want to move and try getting other people off of fb that are sick of its bullshit, but I need to make sure the alternative is a good one and we dont all have to hop around 5 times to get to a good one…
Keep in mind 98% of them are tech illiterate.
I run a humhub instance. It is very similar to fb from years ago. I cannot get anyone to use it though, just me posting for myself. I kinda use it a journal now, with pics and short paragraph or two about what I’ve been up to.
For group messages, I had a hard time getting people to move off of fb messenger. Tried good old text messaging, but everyone has iphones and can’t figure out the difference between I message and text. Also a few of them don’t even have a cell #, so they just can’t text.
I was successful in getting most of everyone over to signal, and I created accounts for my sister and her kids that don’t have phone #'s.
I use kijiji here in Canada, instead of marketplace. It had higher quality buyers and sellers anyway. Less annoying people.
Where is a similar place?
Hell.
Or Minneapolis
I always thought (admittedly, without any objective data points to back me up) that say, a baboon’s taint would be a similar, but better place than fb.
Do you need an alternative? Less time behind a screen does wonders for mental health.
I totally agree, but people are addicted. And they want to keep in touch which is understandable. Id rather give them an alternative because they will go back to corpo net the second anytbing gets too hard.
That’s a journey the individual must take on their own. That’s the challenge of addiction. The reason people come back FB isn’t their friends and family. It’s the incredible force of dark patterns that convince them they are missing out on the world without it.
Since joining Lemmy, I haven’t felt the same pull to browse for hours on end. I usually get about 10-15 minutes in, get bored, and go do something else. Even Reddit would keep me hooked for hours.
With an algorithm purpose-built to drip-feed an endless cycle of dopamine and shock, it takes a few days or even weeks to get used to the slower cycle of information. Our brains want more information all the time, and they use this to their advantage.
On the note of trying to convince someone anyway, focus on the fact that the Fediverse does none of this and that there is no profit incentive behind the platform, meaning they have no incentive to make you feel worse in exchange for more ads.
For a direct, but still early Fediverse replacement, maybe consider Friendica.
I totally agree and I wish people understood that. But many are just like animals hooked on TikTok shorts and endless slop content and its the “norm”.
A big reason I am on fb still is for community events and band stuff. There is no other place for that sort of thing. If you dont post on fb, no one is coming to your show/event.
Not using Facebook or similar is better for your health and time you don’t need a replacement unless you use the marketplace to sell or buy you can always make a new account just for that.
Oh ya im pretty huge on marketplace unfortunately too…and for events and band gigs
unless you use the marketplace to sell or buy you can always make a new account just for that.
You’re forgetting that Facebook is pretty good for organizing large groups and events.
And don’t you dare say Discord. Discord is terrible for large groups. Any Discord server over 1000 people is just pure chaos and useless
Phone numbers still works
(if encryption isn’t a requirement)
Friendica is the fed Facebook.
You’re here. For me this has been a good replacement for whatever I was earlier using Facebook for.
What is there on Facebook that PieFed or Lemmy don’t cover?
Well to me lemmy is more like an anonymous forum. I don’t have friends or family on here.
Do you have them on Facebook, then?
I kind of do, but Facebook hasn’t shown me anything from them in years. Makes their being there largely irrelevant.Yes, all of my friends post on fb and have for the past 12 years or more. Family uses it a lot.
It must be more popular in my area or something. There’s no age difference either, people from 17 to 70 are using it.
Yeah, for what I know I my family used to post a lot there as well. Facebook just mostly stopped showing any content from them some years ago. But when nothing really comes out of it, they don’t bother. They post something, I see some commercial content instead.
I post something, they see some commercial content instead.
I’m a bit surprised to hear Facebook works for some people like it worked a decade ago!
But also, Finnish culture is very different from US culture in how we talk and when, so maybe the algorithm just doesn’t recognize the Finnish kind of engagement and considers us utterly uninterested in each other? Or maybe I’ve just been lucky and FB had been hiccuping? Dunno, there’s no meaningful difference between PieFed and the little of what FB fed me that was not crud.
Ah I see. I make sure to go in and disable all ads and check all my privacy settings every so often so I dont get fed the slop. And I dont engage with it which helps. They track how long you even pause your scrolling to track what you look at. Its gross.
So, of if you deploy a lot of external plugins, Facebook can be made kind of worthwhile? That’s aa little funny :)
Start your own, see what you like first and then invite friends.
Its a lot easier to wrangel the tech illiterate friends when they know you have skin in the game. Instead of " hey lets all join this other social network" go for "im starting my own social network and id love if you would join.
Friendica is probably the closest to facebook.
Personally i really like pleroma and have been running it for about a year now, after having previously tried misskey and some others.
Sometimes I feel I should and could do this, be a place for my community to have an uncentralized social place…but it would take a lot of time and energy and if I mess up it’ll scare everyone away from the fediverse for good…
Its less time and energy then you might think, especially if its for a smaller group without open sign-ups. You could use a service like https://fedihost.co that takes most of the difficulty out of it setting up.
Even if you do use someone else’s instance they can always end up calling it quits for one reason or another (even the big ones). Fediverse works best and stays healthy the more decentralized it is.
I run my own, and it’s not that much time. I’d imagine more users would make it more difficult (I’m effectively the only user on the instance), but not by much more from what I’ve heard, especially if you know all of them.
For messing up: Do regular backups. They’re cheap, usually pretty easy to set up (I use borgbase for it), and if something goes wrong you can usually restore it to a working state minus a few posts.
Friendica also doesn’t update super often, so it’s minimal upkeep beyond the usual “Restart it to fix it” problems, and it’s pretty rare for people to actually care about uptime.
My ONLY gripe is it doesn’t notify you of user moderation reports. I don’t have to care (it’s just me, and I’m not banning myself), but on a higher user instance I can see that mattering more. Maybe ask people to DM you when they send a report or something, and just get into a habit of checking them
Why do you want a replacement if you’re trying to leave?
Isn’t it obvious? I still want a place to connect for events and to talk with friends/family and not have to use fb.
Text? Fuck facebook
Most people view text as very archaic, most people dont use it anymore. (Im not one of those, but people think old is bad nowadays)
How are you going to text 20 people for an upcoming event? Thats not how things work. And its a nighmare between apple and android when texting to boot. I feel like a lot of folks here dont have many friends which is fine, but its a totally different world when you go out and do stuff and meet people and need a way to contact people and set up events.
Its also very very insecure, no more than Facebook though.
Emails or Discord? I don’t like Discord, but that’s been the platform of choice with my social group so I’m sort of stuck with it.
Maybe something similar that isn’t owned by a shitbag
Self host friendica
There is NO ONE on Friendica. You might as well print your posts and tape them to people’s doors at home.
Every new platform has to start somewhere.
No one is on any platform until they are.
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That’s the same as saying there’s NO ONE on PieFed.
FenderStratocaster, you are on Friendica yourself. Your comment saying there’s no one on Friendica is visible on Friendica – therefore, you are there just like you are Lemmy, PieFed and mBin.
(But yeah, my use of Friendica mostly ended after two days, because it’s clunky as hell! I had a feeling that whatever little thing I want to do, I need to first fight the UI like a mouse trying to kill a dragon.)
Not the same.
Facebook is a friend/follower-following/groups type of platform, the people are the key, without them its pointless.
Reddit is a forum of anonymous strangers, you can easily substitute one group of strangers with another group of strangers and have things to talk about. Cuz it’s about topics, not inter-personal relations.
Facebook hasn’t worked that way for me for years. I’m surprised to hear it still does to some! Almost everything in my feed was all kinds of random groups I’m not even a member of. And a lot of content promoting Russian military vehicles in a very ridiculous manner.
I don’t know. I try to see what’s out there and it’s 2 people posting. WIST Quotations and Protestation (Portogues). And that’s really it.
I self-host my own instance of Friendica, and there are a few options, since discovery is nigh impossible on low-user instances:
- If you have admin access, you can use relays. (I used to, but they really impacted the server’s performance, so I stopped)
- If you don’t you can see if there are popular groups to follow (fedi.garden, or there is a friendica group directory)
- Also I use fediwall.social to find accounts to follow, just search up some hashtags from the popular servers to follow interesting accounts
You need to follow some PieFed or Lemmy communities and you’ll see their content. But not in a way that works very well. I really like the idea behind Friendica a lot, but it’s also clear that its developers have lost the track of their own code and do not completely understand what the program really does anymore. The idea is that there’s something like PieFed that understands also several other protocols than just ActivityPub, so you can use one thing to follow almost all of your social media. Which is an awesome idea! But, it doesn’t really work in practical terms.
It looks like there is no well-thought architecture behind its programming code, and instead they just add features atop other features without thinking about consistency or clarity of the programming code.
Typically when the UI is as convoluted to use that of Friendica is, there are also a lot of security problems in the program. I assume that it is possible to breach any Friendica account using some bug that has made its way into the code.
I want a de-centralized social media platform where people I know in real life are on it. There really is no convincing people of switching though.
Just keep sending them cool memes from here or from Mastodon. Some will find them interesting and join up. Most won’t. Also, you’ll need some interesting group they will want to be a member of on Signal or Matrix or XMPP. That way, they also have a chat platform available for their friends as well.
And if you link to something in the Forumverse, link them through an instance you’d like them to use. So, even if the community is on some Lemmy instance, link to it through something such as piefed.social, if that’s what you think would benefit them the most as a choice for a home instance!
It’s a pity this does not work on Mastodon, though, because Mastodon always tries to push users to the instance where the message was written from, if the user is not logged in. Complicates things unnecessarily when the domain is different in every damn link! But with a widely federated Forumverse instance this problem doesn’t exist, because you can link to everything through that. And the people opening the link don’t need to understand anything about Federation. They just see this thing called piefed.social, and that there’s plenty of content you keep throwing at them. Without telling them to join.
there’s no equivalent that has all those people in it. maybe instagram or twitter but it’s not any better obviously :(
Outside getting people to join a fedi platform, Matrix instance, or Signal, all a non-trivial ask, you could see if they’re on Discord or WhatsApp already, which while neither is great at least its a step away. You could do a simple SMS group, if you are okay with the privacy risks - almost everyone still had a phone number.
Post mail surprisingly is still a thing too if you are okay with delayed messages and there being cost.
Honestly, I miss e-Groups/YahooGroups.
I had 4 listservs with hundreds of subscribers on my main art group.
Friendica will be the closest, and from my experience Hubzilla is similar enough. I’ve used Friendica extensively (see: @klymilark@coypu.fallcounty.omg.lol), and I’ve toyed with Hubzilla a bit. Friendica is less complicated in a user-facing way, and Hubzilla doesn’t hide its features.
What is friendica like without the network effect of real people? Or are you connected to IRL friends on there?
I have some IRL friends there, but not many. Most of them are people I met through the fediverse. I’m not sure I understand what you mean by “Without the network effect of real people” though?
The network effect is the phenomenon of “all of my friends are on Facebook, I better join Facebook,” or “all my follows are moving to Bluesky, I better move to Bluesky”.
Here is how Cory Doctorow explains it:
A service has “network effects” if it gets more valuable as users join it. You joined Twitter to talk to the people who were already using it, and then other people joined so they could talk to you.
I think I get it (I hope)? I’ve had a rough couple days sleep and amn’t firing on all cylinders, apologies xD
From the personal side: I don’t really notice it much, because I’ve never really used social media to keep up with people. Facebook was the one I had the most IRL connections on, and I only used it to talk to 5 or 6 people, never for the social media features. It is harder to keep myself on Friendica, and not let it sit idle though. Admittedly it may well just turn into mostly me auto-posting from my blog’s RSS feed, and checking replies occasionally at some point, but I do still check it pretty regularly.
Getting people to switch: I gave up on that before I even started, especially with Friendica. I could probably convince one of my friends to join Lemmy since it’s pretty easy to say “Search lemmyverse.net, copy the community name, paste it” than however you’re supposed to find people on low-pop traditional activity pub styled servers. Plus I am the techiest person I know by a long shot, and while you don’t need to be techie to be on fedi… A lot of us are, so it’s hard to find people who aren’t talking about it as most of what they post.
From the platform’s perspective: Honestly it’s getting better on the whole. It’s not that different to any other apub server, except in that it has more protocols built in (apub, zot, dfrn, and diaspora, plus you can directly follow RSS feeds if you want), and there are a lot of connectors to socials like Tumblr, and even Facebook from what I saw. There’s people here! It’s just convincing people that’s hard.
Sorry if this didn’t actually answer the question, I did my best with a very soupy brain xD Feel free to ask any questions though!
Friendica actually happened to be a decent one (as it looks like Facebook), but there’s this:
