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.
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.
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:
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!
Hi, thanks a lot for your detailed message!
I totally understand the lack of faith - I mean I've shown nothing to earn any faith so that's completely fair. I also share your frustration with existing apps that have shown to not improve or be good enough. That's part of the reason why I wanted to try my hand at it myself. I feel that the status quo is not good enough and I believe in the mantra that "if someone else is doing something that you think you can do better, you should do it".
Not sure what you mean with "damage" here, but my plan is to support all kinds of ActivityPub content, both the microblog stuff that Mastodon is known for, the forum stuff that Lemmy does and anything else from other apps. I don't want my app to feel limited like Mastodon or Lemmy. Mastodon is very microblog-focused, Lemmy is very forum-focused. I want something that can do both and more. In some ways, this makes it harder, in other ways it makes it simpler. For instance, Lemmy makes a difference between "posts" and "comments"; they are not the same thing in the database. But in my app, comments are just another post, much like how posts work in Mastodon.
I've heard of these projects, but haven't studied them in detail. I find bonfire especially confusing. I can't seem to grok what it is - is it a server, or a framework for a server, or an app? For instance there's this app but the code link goes nowhere. There's also this repo with commits that look super weird. Honestly just confused about it. Anyway.
I agree that having good mobile support (including an app with great UX) is super important.
I've tried to learn a lot about ActivityPub and I understand it fairly well at this point I would say. I've participated a bit at https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/ where ActivityPub is discussed at length. I'm not sure what "Masters of the Fediverse" refers to but I definitely am a curious soul and I think continuous learning is super important :)
I appreciate your concern, but I am a professional software engineer so I'm not so worried about the scale of the project. Rest assured, I have worked on very large projects professionally and built plenty of things in side projects, most of them related to the web. I also administrate Feddit.dk so I have experience with hosting a Lemmy instance and all the complexity that brings.
I particularly enjoy Rust, and I did actually look into contributing to Lemmy (since that uses Rust in the backend) at first before I started my own project. Unfortunately, Lemmy's code is... not where I would like it to be (both of Lemmy's main devs learnt Rust while working on Lemmy, and it unfortunately shows in the code quality), and the direction of Lemmy is not the direction I want to take my project, as stated above. I want something more general than a Reddit clone, though it will be inspired by Reddit/Lemmy in some ways (I plan to use up/down votes to sort content, for instance).
I have no interest in contributing to Friendica, as the direction seems bad, as noted in the post above. Besides, it's PHP and I really don't want to touch that. Hubzilla is also PHP and seems much to technical for general users, so once again not viable. Bonfire seems to be Elixir which I don't know either, but again I am super confused about what Bonfire even is. All these reasons and other reasons are why I wanted to do my own project.
I don't agree with you that the Mastodon API is an "industry standard" - it may be widely used, but Mastodon is continually forcing its own ideas of the Fediverse on the rest of the ecosystem, which I don't like and is something that is often bemoaned on https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/. But rest assured that I am very familiar and comfortable with APIs (again, professional software engineer 🙂). I care about documentation a lot and from the start, my prototype backend has exposed its API via an OpenAPI specification so that clients can be easily generated. I'm actually about to use this OpenAPI spec to generate a client myself as I start work on the frontend 🙂.
Again, thanks a lot for your thoughts and attention! If you have any concrete feedback on the UI and/or UX of Lemmy, Mastodon, Friendica or other apps, I'd love to hear it, as I'm starting work on the UI for my own frontend these days. For instance, any favourite UI of a fediverse app, any preferred features or any common mistakes or pitfalls that should be avoided, if you have any thoughts along that direction.
I hope it's clear that this is a "methodological distrust", but I'm rooting for you!
Right!
I'm referring to this: https://github.com/lemmyNet/lemmy/issues/5300
The reason why Mastodon doesn't show the text of Lemmy's initial posts is that they don't want to properly manage the Activitypub message flow. Do they do it out of inexperience? Out of laziness? Or do they do it to penalize Lemmy who (two years ago) was the only software capable of challenging for supremacy in the Fediverse? Friendica's "Posts with Title" (so-called "Pages") had the same problem: Friendica developers found an interesting way to solve the problem, namely adding an option to publish the post as a "Page" (Mastodon reads it as a title with a link to the original post) or as a "Note" (Mastodon reads it all). But this is a solution that violates the Activitypub standard and in fact Lemmy developers refused to do it because they are very proud (remember when I told you that software developers in the Fediverse are often in a bad mood? 😜).
it's a complicated goal, but not impossible
I agree: I've often told their developers that they have a serious communication problem! What I don't like about Bonfire, however, is that it has so far seriously underestimated the importance of Activitypub groups.
Gargron, Dansup, Evan Prodromou and longtime Friendica developers Hubzilla and Lemmy :-)
Great!
Even more… great! A Fediverse project really needs a team. One-man-show projects are too risky and emotionally draining
From what you say, it seems like you've really nailed the current Fediverse landscape
Yes, that puts my mind at ease!
This makes me even more reassured! 🙂
Can I ask you to create a Lemmy community or a Friendica group? It would be nice to discuss in one place
Honestly not really clear - what do you mean with "methodological distrust"? What method would be trustworthy? :)
I agree, bus factor is a problem. But I feel like projects like this are very hard to start without starting as one person. I mean it's hard to gather people around something without having anything to show at first. I'm hoping to establish something and then attract people who might be interested to contribute.
I feel it's too early for that (again, don't want to shout about it yet). But eventually I would definitely like to do that.
Let me explain: after seeing that:
after seeing this, I do not want to get my hopes up... 😂😂😂
I understand. However, I can tell you what I personally consider fundamental in a Fediverse software:
Extra options:
As for the apps, I find that Raccoon for Friendica has introduced some ergonomic innovations in many ways points of view:
That's fair haha. I definitely understand that. Building open source software, or really any software, is frought with possibility of failure. I don't claim to be the survivor who will get through it all, that would be incredibly naive of me to claim. I'm just trying, just like others have tried before me :)
I definitely plan to support groups. Do you mean anything in particular with "optimal" management? I mean what would be "suboptimal" management? Do you just mean an incomplete implementation?
Are you mostly talking about performance here? Or how do you mean?
Definitely agree images are important. I honestly question the value of RSS feeds. It's not something "normal" users use. It's very much a techy thing. I don't know any non-technical person who even knows what RSS is or has ever even heard of it.
I plan to support applications and/or invitation trees (like lobste.rs uses). But more could be added I suppose. What features are you thinking of?
Definitely agree moderation is important. I want to ensure moderation is well supported with good moderation tools.
I think you need a WYSIWYG editor. That's what normal people expect.
I'd like to support polls and events. As said before, I want to support all kinds of content ideally.
What is a circle in Friendica? I'm not familiar.
I'm planning and architecting the system to support filtering and good search functionality. Everything is accessible via the backend API (how else?).
I mean this:
Yes, it seems that Piefed has optimized the DB well
I understand, I myself have completely ignored them; but they are the cleanest fruition protocol that currently exists and enhancing them is important (and today every software in the Fediverse does it, with little effort)
Nice!
Nothing special, but for example with Mastodon I can check the IPs of the subscribers directly from the user interface and I can easily check if the same email has been used, without entering the DB. With Lemmy I can customize the subscription page to give instructions to users waiting for approval.
Good idea!
In Friendica (and Bonfire) a circle is a list of users to whom I can restrict the visibility of a message. Unfortunately Friendica does it with DFRN, Bonfire I don't know how it does it, but it's very interesting to limit some interactions to groups of friends or distinct groups based on the type of relationship (family, colleagues, etc)
I'm designing and planning the system to support filtering and a good search functionality. Everything is accessible via the backend API (otherwise how?).
Exactly like this
Finally I add that systems like Friendica and Bonfire allow you to manage both multiple accounts (a user can create secondary accounts) and, consequently, also accounts shared with other accounts (delegated accounts). For example, I can create an account for my newspaper and have it managed by fellow journalists who have a Friendica account on my server; or I can create a "Group" account and have it managed by the moderators of the group
Thanks for the clarifications and thoughts!
How do we keep track of the project and support it?
It's very early. I have a prototype backend server and I'm currently starting work on the frontend. If you have any inputs on features, UX, UI, or anything else that you maybe are missing from existing fediverse apps, I'd love to hear from you, as some preliminary feedback. But again, it's early so there is not much to track yet. But thank you for the interest :)
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 :)