Diaspora* vs Friendica
About two months ago I created a Friendica account to make a comparison with Diaspora*. I wanted to know if Friendica is a good alternative to Diaspora*. A problem that I have with Diaspora*, at least on my pod, is the lack of control of the stream. The stream contains all the posts from the hashtags and people that I follow. Although this is an excellent way to create a stream it also results in much unwanted posts. An example, if I follow someone on Diaspora* I get every post. If for instance I find another person interesting for his/her ideas about the Fediverse I also get all the kitty pictures. In this case I often end up ignoring the person entirely which is a pity.
Filtering in Friendica
Friendica provides much better control over the posts in /network (this is the equivalent of the Diaspora* stream). This is achieved with several filter options. Under /settings/addon these filtering options can be found. Here is a summary:
- Collapse (=partially hide) posts from specified users with Blockem
- Allow only specified languages. Other languages are collapsed (Language Filter)
- Collapse posts with specified hashtags e.g nsfw (Content Filter)
- Block specified users (Superblock)
- Advanced Content Filter, a very versatile filter that allows to collapse posts on about every property found in a post, such as body text, title, author boolean combinations of properties. This is done in so called rules. The Advanced Content Filter uses Symfony’s Expression Language. The following link provides some examples https://github.com/friendica/friendica/wiki/Advanced-Content-Filter-addon. Advanced Content Filter enables the user for instance to collapse every post that has an image (and saves me a lot of scrolling) or has certain text in the body. A simple example, the rule
body matches "/politics/"collapses every post that contains the word ‘politics’.
Furthermore Friendica displays at the top of a post when a filter is used. This way it’s easy to determine if the filtering works as intended.
All in all the filtering options of Friendica are a good way to control the posts in the stream improving the experience of the social network. The image filter and the language filter alone strongly reduce the amount of mouse scrolling for me.