@serenity I like Friendica more than Mastodon.
this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2023
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@serenity
"When to use Friendica over Mastodon?"
Short answer: always
Long answer: Friendica is the software of the fedeverse that allows the most complete user experience. However, thanks to the fact that Mastodon was the first successful project on activitypub and to the fact that it addressed a very specific target (Twitter users), its users have always been much more numerous than those of other software and this has meant more money and more funding which has allowed the mastodon developers to improve many aspects.
For this reason, as well as for contingent reasons (the immediacy of microblogging is an immanent feature), the comparison between Friendica and Mastodon highlights some aspects in which Mastodon is objectively superior. Between these:
- an essential and compact timeline
- universal compatibility, due simply to the fact that all other fediverse projects must adapt to mastodon if they don't want to be cut off from the larger audience
- a modern and ergonomic graphical interface (while the Friendica one looks like the alpha version of MySpace)
- apparently faster servers: this is due to the fact that some fediverse virtualization and optimization projects are focused on mastodons; But this is also a consequence of the fact that the greater number of mastodon users allows the servers hosting the community to be financed with more donations. moreover, the increase in users of a single instance generates disruptions, slowdowns and shock waves for the entire faith universe. In fact, the disproportionate increase in mastodon users in the last three months has also led to a slowdown for smaller instances: today friendica servers are also slowed down due to the increase in mastodon users.
- mastodon has an excellent moderation system that allows you to limit the proliferation of bots, spam and scams
- mastodon is clearly aimed at an audience made up of former Twitter users; friendica on the other hand, despite being the only real alternative to Facebook, presents itself as an object without clear characterization, without a "strong message", and aimed at a heterogeneous audience
friendica on the other hand, despite being the only real alternative to Facebook, presents itself as an object without clear characterization, without a "strong message", and aimed at a heterogeneous audience
Yea, the fact that it was not that much cathered at being the alternative to something (in this case Facebook) really left it behind, although it is more feature complete. Hell, even diaspora has more users according to fediverse.observer. And given the development speed boost that followed the bird site takeover (which came along with the user influx), I'm afraid that Mastodon is likely to catch up and leave less room for Friendica to have a meaning for new users.
At the moment, at least, there is an influx of new users going on for quite a few months, so it definitely seems to be taking off, but it still leaves Friendica behind many other social networks, sadly.
Imo, Friendica missed some opportunities when it really had the chance of attracting new users, and given the extent of Facebook, it really could attract more users, possibly flip the balance, at least with today's feature set. I only found recently about this whole Fediverse thing, but I was against Twitter due to the post character limit (why the hell should I have to create more than one post in order to post that seldom long idea that I have stuck in my head from time to time?), so I naturally disliked Mastodon's model, although I like many other things at it. And over time I grew fond of its feature set. This is why I really hope Friendica will be able to take a part of the pie in the future.
@notizie @petrescatraian @serenity Friendica and Hubzilla are a bit hard to learn. These platforms need better onboarding process. The greatest advantage of Mastodon is that it is pretty familiar and doesn't overwhelm with features.
@serenity @petrescatraian @notizie @shuro Yeah indeed. I felt the same with Friendica in the beginning but I'm a nerd so I can overcome it 😃 but I wouldn't recommend Friendica to my friends if they aren't IT people.
Also, the lack of support for accessibility from Friendica is a big NoNo for me. Mastodon made me learn to use CW and all-text and I can't backtrack on a software that has less inclusivity options.
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@serenity It is possible to use content warning and alt text in Friendica posts (not very convenient but it works).
There is lack of other features though - can't create or vote in polls, can't upload video and audio, can't block by domain.
Thanks all for the replies (I see one comment here on this instance, but twelve when I look at lemmy.ml). Nice to see more Friendica here!
@serenity Well, I feel great that I can post and comment to Reddit with my FB account in this regard, haha ;)
I am really afraid of not doxxing myself though, haha. On the former I am more vocal usually, while on the latter I am more personal. So now I have a mix of social identities that I use for both being vocal and personal.
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Worth noting (since this isn't mentioned anywhere in the text): Friendica is slow as fuck
@serenity @f00fc7c8 @rom It's not even sorta fast, but I've found it to be the most functional for me out of the bunch. In addition to Friendica, I've played around with Diaspora, Mastadon, Pleroma, Misskey, plus the forks Calckey and Akkoma. Friendica's ability to easily follow tags and rss feeds, plus the lemmy and diaspora integration, as well as the ease of import/export really shows where some of the others are lacking. That said, UI/UX customization in Friendica leaves quite a bit to be desired.
@serenity @f00fc7c8 @rom @eshep Exactly. Seems there's still a lot of confusion about how federation works.
My issue with Friendica is that it takes several seconds to render the "timeline" sometimes. Tempted to move the docker containers from the RPi that's currently hosting them to my M1-pro MacBook.
@serenity @rom @eshep @f00fc7c8 I tried to import/move my profile to my own instance but I got an error saying page not found :S did you succeed with that`?
I agree with what you say. Is your experience that Friendica is slower than the others? My guess would be that Friendica is programmed in PHP which executes slower than other programming languages.
@eshep @serenity @f00fc7c8 @rom @anders I am not sure it is about PHP but it depends how you see it.
Friendica can be rather resource-intensive, especially for public instance. Some of them feel slow because they are somewhat overloaded. On badly overloaded servers delivery times suffer.
Also mostly static interface of Friendica which I like also means most operations reload the entire page. E.g. when you go to someone's profile it can take the same time (say 8 seconds) on Friendica and Misskey/Pleroma/Mastodon but on the latter you don't see the page redrawn - it stays the same and something spins loading the data. On Friendica you see full page reload. It is perceived slower.
Also in some aspects Friendica is inherently slower by design. E.g. when posting comment on Mastodon it is fired off right away (well, almost), on Friendica it is queued for delivery and the worker runs on interval (usually every 2-5 mins). It isn't a problem but feels more like email or old school forum while other platforms can feel more like instant messaging.
Did you try the recent 13.x release of Misskey? Apparently it got a massive speed improvement. Didn't try it myself yet though and also don't really have fresh memory to compare it against.
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I first struggled with my single-user Friendica instance after I added all followed accounts from Mastodon. Very slow, sometimes even not responding at all.
After tweaking some settings the site is running quite smootly. So it depends on the setup.
Yes, Mastodon out-of-the-box is faster on most machines, but Friendica can be made very usable.
Via clients like WhaleBird or Fedilab, I don't feel any difference.
@serenity
@serenity @zeitverschreib @rom What sort of tweaks did you do?
Let's see...
PHP memory limit up to 2048
Number of workers to 20
The workers now run every 5 minutes instead of 10 (cron)
Increased the values of pm.max_children , pm.start_servers, pm.min_spare_servers and
pm.max_spare_servers.
I'm running this setup on Yunohost in a VM with 2 cores and a total of 16 GB RAM. Currently only 7 or 8 GB are used, that's including Mastodon on the same server.
Giving the friendica instance more resources really helped, the standard settings are too restrictive.
@serenity @rom
@serenity @zeitverschreib @rom Thanks. Currently running mine on a raspberry pi 4 with 2 gigs, so limited in what I can give it. Considering moving it to something with more resources though.
Can this be used for social news sharing, like lemmy?
@jay91 You can create forums, which are, practically, like fb groups. In fact, Lemmy communities appear as forums as well. Hell, you can even set your account as a news organization:
imgur.com/7wVSTRe.png
@[email protected] wrote:
* No option for a content warning in a post you’re creating. This option is heavily used in Mastodon e.g to warn people for a post about a sensitive topic e.g politics. Friendica does respect content warnings from Mastodon though.
* No option to add a text to an image. Mastodon has this option to include visually impaired people.
* No option to blur an image. In Mastodon this is a feature similar to a content warning for a text.
Have you tried BBCodes? while in your node press on your profile name in the top-right corner of your screen (if you're using the Frio theme) > Help > BBCode tag reference to see what you can do. They can do everything you said.
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