Tag: social network

Categories
FLOSS open source social

When to use Friendica over Mastodon

There are many software options to choose from if you want to enter the Fediverse. To name a few, there is of course Mastodon where most people are likely to land on nowadays but there is also Epicyon, Friendica and Pleroma to name just a few. Every option has it’s own unique style, features, pros and cons but in the end they all provide access to the same Fediverse.

I’m a long time user of Mastodon because I like how the web interface enables me to communicate with the Fediverse. The lay-out of the columns with home, notification, local timeline etc always had a certain appeal to me. The last week however, during the first large Twitter migration, I’ve got a bit overwhelmed with too many toots on my home stream not to mention the local timeline. Then my instance Fosstodon had some down time. In these exciting times I was kind of anxious to follow the situation from within the Fediverse. Without access to Mastodon I took refuge to my old Friendica account. I wrote about Friendica in the past but I stopped using it mainly because of the cluttered UI that often confused me.

Entering the Fediverse with Friendica again made me appreciate the Friendica software. First there is just one column or stream instead of three or more in Mastodons web interface. This provides a certain calmness that I was looking for at this moment. Also Friendica provides the option to change the UI by customizing the theme of even by choosing another theme. The combination of these two provides an experience that is currently easier for my eyes and mind.

The Frio theme of Friendica with a dark color scheme which I find easier to the eyes.

Another important difference is that I’m easily able to create groups. When I connect with someone I can add that person to a group that I created e.g friend, acquaintance. I even created groups for companies and bots. Now with just a single mouse click I can change my stream to e.g friends to see what they have to tell today. I use this feature often. I know that Mastodon has a list feature where I can do more or less the same but I somehow never really use it. To take it even further I can create a group with RSS feeds and WordPress blogs. This turns Friendica into a news reader.

Getting back to the cluttered user interface I was talking about. Friendica allows the user to make changes to the user interface. There are a couple of themes to choose from and the themes can be customized in color. Also the layout and the content of the stream can be adjusted. This way I was able to create a style that is easier to digest making Friendica a much better experience than it was for me in the past.

And the list of features in Friendica goes on:

  • Friendica wants you to be able to communicate with every one so besides ActivityPub it supports other protocols such as Diaspora*.
  • It’s easy to access older posts because of the archive option.
  • An event calendar.
  • And a very advanced text editor to create a post that BTW isn’t limited in length. This doesn’t mean that your stream is filled with long ramblings. Just the first few lines of a post will be shown.
  • The ability to create or join a forum. The forum allows people to join a special interest group for discussion etc.
  • A feature to ‘quote share’ a post from someone else. It’s my understanding that this is a much requested feature from Twitter migrants.
  • As an advantage of Friendica I wanted to mention you can have posts with hashtags in your stream and that you can edit a post that has already been published but with version 4.0 this is also possible in Mastodon.

There are also features lacking in Friendica (or I couldn’t find them) that are available in Mastodon. Notably:

  • 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.

It appears to me that Mastodon has more options for inclusion than Friendica like the features mentioned above and deliberate not having the feature of ‘quote sharing’.

I realize that I haven’t even scratched the surface of all the features of Friendica. But I can safely conclude that Friendica is more for power users and for people that want even more control over their stream and don’t want to get overwhelmed with a flood of information such as the local timeline in Mastodon. It lets you fine tune the information even better with easy one click selections of groups. It’s also for people that want to stay in contact with people over different parts of the Fediverse (e.g Mastodon and Diaspora*) and want to be able to keep these contacts manageable in one single stream together with hashtags and RSS feeds.

Friendica local news stream fills the time line with news (in my case mostly German)
A forum on Friendica which allows for special topics to be discussed.
Categories
open source social

To improve Funkwhale

I’ve been following Funkwhale for a while now and have written earlier about the project. Before I start I want to make clear that I love Funkwhale and I’m thankful to the developers and other contributors that have made it awesome. Lately however it has become obvious to me that the project could get more traction if the social interaction between users would be improved. Currently a user can do little to interact with an artist or other users. Also the interface can be confusing for people that are new to Funkwhale. It’s therefore that I’ve come up with some tips for the developers to tweak Funkwhale to provide the user a better experience.

But first what is Funkwhale. If you already know you can skip this paragraph and the next. Funkwhale lets you listen and share music and audio within a decentralized, open network. So you can upload your music library and share it with friends and family. Music from the public domain or with a Creative Commons license can be shared with all Funkwhale users. Funkwhale currently consists of 53 known servers (called pods in Funkwhale) which can communicate together using standard, free and open source technology. Funkwhale uses the ActivityPub protocol that is often used in the Fediverse, an ensemble of federated servers.

Funkwhale is both for people that create music or podcast and people that just like to listen to it. You can join an existing pod or create your own pod. The last option provides the most control over your music or podcasts. Other than Soundcloud or Bandcamp, Funkwhale is not owned by a central organization. Instead it’s a federation of pods from different owners that share music and podcasts.

Currently the user can explore and listen to music that is uploaded by others. Basic functions like adding to favourites, adding to a playlist or downloading are in place but discoverability and social functions are either non-existing or poorly implemented.

Discoverability. I would love to see a Trending tab in the Explore section. This Trending tab could contain a list of songs that are favoured the most e.g in the last month and a list of songs that are listened to the most in that same period.

Social interaction. Furthermore it would be nice to be able to see number of ‘streams’ per song or the number of times a song is favoured. Maybe further down the line could be the ability to comment on a song although I’m aware of the moderation problems that may cause.

Interface. The interface of Funkwhale is confusing at first. It took me a while to make sense of it with terms like channels, libraries, playlists and radios. Sure they all sound familiar but the intricacies were lost to me in the beginning. I wish I had read the user manual of Funkwhale sooner but I suppose many users just don’t read manuals. Anyway channels are a collection of audio files published directly on Funkwhale. While libraries are used to store collections of music such as your personal music collection or a collection of publicly available music. So a channel would be more for an artist to publish his or her own creations while libraries is for uploading work from others. Playlist have more or less the same function that they have on other music services. A user can create one, add or delete selected songs etc to a queue. Radios on the other hand enable the user to create a queue of music by a range of user defined parameters called filters (a pretty cool feature if you ask me). In addition the interface of Funkwhale has a great number of inconsistencies. To name just one when I open the queue I’m unable to favourite or get more information about any queued song. To conclude this part, the interface of Funkwhale offers a lot of great options but needs to be made more consistent and simplified for the user.

Funkwhale has so much potential and it’s, as far as I know, the only software out there that allows musicians and music listeners to share music and socially interact at the same time in a network without the burden of a centralized network where one organization tells you what you can and cannot do. The Funkwhale project is young and in its infancy so I’m convinced that it will improve over time and that the issues that I mentioned will be addressed. In the mean time I’ll enjoy using Funkwhale when listening to my own library of music, explore what music other have uploaded or just listen to my favourite podcast.

Some useful links for Funkwhale:

Categories
open source social

The Movim social network

It’s more than two years ago that I started using the social network #Movim after a tip from an acquaintance. I had left G+ and never wanted to use a centralized social media platform again. I tried Mastodon and Friendica, Diaspora and Movim but eventually I kept using Movim and Mastodon with my Friendica account as a back-up for Mastodon. The secret of Movim is tranquillity. After logging in for the first time the news stream is empty, much like Diaspora, and it only gets filled with post from people that you follow, communities that you subscribe to and rss feeds. This in combination with an easy to use chat option that gives access to whole #XMPP network makes Movim very powerful.

It’s also incredibly easy to create a community in Movim, although I think community isn’t the most appropriate description here. It’s more a blog from one or more persons where other users can subscribe to, like and comment in a linear fashion.

I recently introduced my wife to Movim and the first thing that surprised her is that, contrary to FB, the news stream contained articles worth reading instead of ads and other bs. She also liked the fact that she could use any XMPP-client for chat. Time will tell if she’ll keep using it but her initial enthusiasm was very encouraging.

Although, I’m pretty psyched about Movim I would like to see some features. First, coming back to the tranquillity, when in the news stream on the right side five posts of other Movim users appear. I suppose that this is meant for discovery and that’s great but in some of the posts I’m less interested but I can’t block or hide these posts.

Also there is no way to block or hide a person entirely. This may become a problem since Movim appears to be becoming more and more popular and with that the interaction between people grows exponentially.

Currently I’m lazily using the European server of Movim but I (or anyone else) can deploy a self-hosted instance and I’m tempted to experiment with that. I’ll probably get back to that.

Finally, I want to thank Timothée Jaussoin and other contributors for developing Movim and making it available to all of us. It’s awesome. And if you read this please consider donating to the Movim project.

Link to my initial thoughts about Movim: https://homehack.nl/movim-floss-alternative-for-hangouts/

Categories
open source social

Freedom in the Cloud (eleven years later)

I watched the famous speech ‘Freedom in the Cloud’ of Eben Moglen in 2010 at the ISOC-NY. Again if I might add. That speech had a great influence on me. It was the first time that I realised that client-server infrastructure of the internet is a huge problem. This very infrastructure ensured that all the data were aggregated and used (or abused) by the ones that owned the servers. At the same time the clients were being deprived of power. And that with the accumulation of servers in a data centre and he virtualisation of the servers (cloud) these owners were getting even more powerful.

I wasn’t the only one that was influenced by this speech of Eben. It also marked the beginning of the development of Diaspora social network. As it happens some of the initial developers of Diaspora were present at that Friday night at ISOC-NY and it inspired them to build the Diaspora software.

A lot has changed the last eleven years, and I will get to that, but what hasn’t changed is the client-server infrastructure, the source of evil. If anything the power of ones that own the servers like Facebook, Amazon, Google, Apple and even Twitter has increased greatly in the last 10 years. And as a consequence the ones working on the client side have become even more powerless. Snowden (2013) and Cambridge Analytica (2016) are just a few examples that demonstrate that this abuse of the ‘architecture of the catastrophe’ took directions that we couldn’t have envisioned.

On the plus side since 2010 a lot of developments have started to halt this catastrophe. Some were more successful than other but it’s undeniable that if someone is looking for a free (as in freedom) alternative right now a lot more options are available than 10 years ago. Also these options seem to be sustainable and rather successful. The Fediverse with Mastodon, Pleroma, PeerTube, Funkwhale, Pixelfed, Lemmy and others have made great progress since the introduction of the ActivityPub protocol. XMPP has made great progress with the introduction of advanced clients like Conversations, Movim and Gajim.

The Freedombox hasn’t lived up to it’s expectations though. The development of Freedombox was initiated by Eben and allows to set up a simple private server in your home. The last time I checked even Diaspora was not supported by Freedombox making social networking with it impossible. Luckily other initiatives have taken flight such as Yunohost. They make it easy to self-host a server and install software for blog, chat, social networking, online storage and file sharing. Yunohost and others bring the dream of Eben closer of a peer-to-peer network instead of a client-server network.

Another noteworthy development is Scuttlebutt, a client-based peer-to-peer application for encrypted social network. Just install the app on your PC or phone (Manyverse) and communicate directly with others that installed the app.

Or Briar, a client for messaging that uses Bluetooth, WiFi and the Tor network to communicate. The need to host your own server has been replaced by simply installing an app that doesn’t rely on a central server. Even if the internet is down the information keeps flowing over WiFi and Bluetooth.

Although we still live in the catastrophe that Eben spoke about eleven years ago there are more possibilities to escape and it appears that more and more people are discovering this. With every scandal, every update of the term of service a wave of new users appears on the networks that I mentioned above and that’s something to be grateful about but it should also motivate us to keep fighting for a free (as in freedom) internet.

Categories
open source social

Lemmy, the federated alternative of Reddit

Since I left Google+ and Reddit four years ago I always missed the community approach of both social networks. I’m pretty active on Mastodon, the federated (and better, kinder) version of Twitter. However on Mastodon it’s hard for me to have a structured conversation with a group of people about a single topic. It’s for that reason that lately I’ve spend time on Lemmy.

Lemmy is easiest described as a federated Reddit alternative. This means that with Lemmy members can send text posts, links and images that can be up- or down voted by other members. Lemmy already consists of tens of instances and thousands of communities. Communities (the equivalent of subreddits) are the cornerstones of Lemmy. Popular topics like Linux, open source and privacy already have their own community. If a community doesn’t exist the user can easily create one. Just click Create Community, fill in a form and press Create and you’re done. Every post has to be posted in one of the communities. A huge advantage is that posts don’t get buried by hundreds of other posts in the timeline. As a consequences discussion threads are easy to follow.

The UI of Lemmy is minimalistic but very effective. The user is presented with a list of comments that are ordered by popularity. The comments can easily be filtered e.g to only show the new comments. Via a menu selection all the communities are shown and can be searched. Overall search is very well implemented. I use it a lot to learn about topics of interest to me that were discussed earlier.

Lemmy comes with a built in slur filter which I believe is a very good idea if you want to have civil discussions. Perhaps not everyone does agree with this filter but Lemmy is free and open source software so one can always create his own fork.

I was active on the lemmy.ml instance but I left it because it’s too extreme and there were too many trolls and zealots on that instance. Luckily I found a more moderate instance called Beehaw. It’s smaller that lemmy.ml but that’s not very relevant since the it federates with the other instances of Lemmy. I can still access and subscribe to communities on other instances and take part in discussions there by clicking the All tab. One difference that Beehaw has with other instances is that the downvotes are disabled.

Besides the slur filter mentioned above the Lemmy comes with a Code of Conduct that is enforced by a team of moderators. Again a good idea for the above mentioned civil discussion. It’s worth mentioning that the moderators keep a public Modlog where one can keep track of all the actions taken by the moderators. A gesture of transparency that I haven’t seen on any social platform.

The beauty is that Mastodon and Lemmy (and all other federated social networks) serve different purposes so I don’t have to choose. They can co-exist and enable people to optimize their online social needs all with free and open source software and all federated.

EDIT: This post was rewritten on 17th August of 2021 and again on 3th November 2022 to include my latest experience with Lemmy.

Categories
social

Guide for GPlus refugees to choose a new social network in the Fediverse

Time is running out for GPlus refugees. G+ will close on April 2nd. So to help people that haven’t decided yet where to go in the Fediverse I made some pointers.

I divided this guide in a number of sections. Each section describes a certain use of social networks and which networks are most suitable for this specific use. Combine this with your preferred use of a social network and you should be able make a decision.

The Fediverse logo
Fediverse logo

Micro- or macroblog

In general a macroblogger writes longer posts with longer intermittent periods while a microblogger writes short bursts on a daily basis. Microblog networks typically have a maximum post length of hundreds of characters. The macroblogger can choose between Diaspora*, Socialhome, Friendica and Hubzilla. The microblogger can choose between Mastodon, Pleroma, Misskey or GNU Social.

user interface

Arguably the most important part of a social network is the interface. Lot’s of G+ users like the smooth interface with the grid layout, the stream with updates on people, collections and communities that you follow and the lack of ads. G+ has an algorithm but unlike FB my stream felt mostly relevant with interesting posts (ok, lets forget about discover which I never used because it mostly served me rubbish).

First, none of the social networks of the Fediverse show ads or have some kind of algorithm to influence the stream of posts. All macroblog social networks (see above) have a stream only with updates on people and topics (tags in Diaspora*) that you! follow. The interface of Mastodon is very different from G+ and has more similarities with Twitter. It allows you the follow users but not topics (although the user can search for tags). Nevertheless the interface of Mastodon works very well and might be an important reason that this social network is currently by far the most popular of the Fediverse.

If the grid-like layout of G+ is important to you, Socialhome features a similar grid-like layout.

ease of use

The different social networks in the Fediverse have a widely different user experience. Now it’s up for debate which is easy to use and which is not but I’ll give my opinion on this. The most easy to use social networks are in my opinion Mastodon and Diaspora* and I recommend them for beginners in the Fediverse. Both have a relatively simple interface with easy access to the functions and concentrate on social interaction. On the other end of the spectrum are Hubzilla and Friendica. Both these social networks are packed with functionality and Hubzilla is even more than a social network (e.g it allows the user to create a website). The interface for both can be difficult to master with lots of options, menus and submenus. It took me a considerable time to find all the functionality in Friendica and after half a year I still find new options.

Mobile

If mobile is important it’s good to know that some social network are supported by multiple mobile apps while others (mostly the newer social network) current don’t have a mobile app. I believe that Mastodon is best supported with multiple mobile apps. Diaspora*, Friendica, Hubzilla, GNU Social and Pleroma have at least one mobile app. As far as I know Socialhome lacks a mobile app.

Support for Diaspora* protocol

If it’s important to connect with friends on Diaspora* it’s good to know that currently not all social networks in the Fediverse enable you to do that. Socialhome is based on the Diaspora* protocol while Friendica and Hubzilla support it. Friendica and Hubzilla are the only social networks that’s able to connect with (I believe) all social networks of the Fediverse.

Photo/Video

If photo’s are very important to you (think Instagram) Pixelfed is designed with photo sharing in mind. The same can be said about PeerTube for video.

Sharing/castinG

If your interested in sharing more than discussing or having a conversation you either need to choose for a social network with the largest number of users or a social network that can connect with all other networks. The best choice for that is either Mastodon or for the latter Friendica or perhaps Pleroma or Hubzilla.

Discover/be inspired

If you want to discover what’s going on in the Fediverse you’ll either want to choose Mastodon because of its size or a network that connects with most other social networks. I believe that in the latter case Friendica is the best choice but if you’re less interested in the Diaspora* side of things you can also choose Hubzilla or Pleroma.

Shared interest

G+ was the shared interest network and that gap is hard to fill. Nevertheless there are options. Mastodon has servers that are for people interested in specific topics like art (mastodon.art), open source (Fosstodon), Linux (linuxrocks.online), technology (mastodon.technology)) or science (scholar.social). Diaspora* takes a different approach where contacts can be ordered in aspects. By default the aspects are Family, Friends, Acquaintances and Work (social circles) but special interests aspects such as Science op OpenSource can very well be added. The groups in Friendica have a similar working.

Private message

Social networks such as Mastodon, Diaspora, Friendica and Hubzilla can be used for private messages but keep in mind that if you’re on Diaspora you can’t send a private message to someone on Mastodon vice versa.

Connect with G+ friends

G+ users went everywhere but the’re some likely places where you can meet old G+ friends. The most prominent is likely the Diaspora* instance (=server) Pluspora. As the name indicates Pluspora is especially created for G+ refugees so there’s a good chance you’ll find friends over there. It may be good to point out that Pluspora is part of the Diaspora* network. I’ve also seen some of my old G+ friends surfacing on either Mastodon or on Diaspora*.

There is no denying that G+ filled a gap in the market of social media networks. G+ was a shared interest network where the user could follow multiple persons on collections or I could join a community around a specific interest. This gap isn’t easy to fill by any social media network. Now my last tip is this. Take your time to look around in your new network, don’t expect it to be like G+ but keep an open mind and judge it on its own merits. After some time you’ll discover that this new social network has its own qualities that you start to care about and love.

Link to my blog post about FLOSS tools to create a community or forum: http://homehack.nl/floss-tools-to-create-a-forum-or-community/

Link to a blog post about distributed social networks: http://homehack.nl/distributed-social-networks/

EDIT 25 February 2019: I removed the Osada social network because the developers decided to abandon it. Instead they are concentrating their efforts on the Zap social network which is similar to Osada with one huge difference that Zap doesn’t support the ActivityPub protocol.

Categories
social

When to use Friendica over Diaspora*

Lately I’ve came across discussions and questions about the difference between Diaspora* and Friendica. So, after an earlier reply today describing when it’s worthwhile to use Friendica instead of Diaspora, I decided to expand on that post. On the surface both social networks look similar, they allow for blogging with a markup language to structure text, the interface shows similarities and they share most of the functionality. Although they were both released in 2010 Diaspora is much better known and has more users. So why use Friendica at all?

I therefore defined some typical use cases where Friendica could be beneficial:

  1. Being able to connect and communicate with contacts from various social networks of the Fediverse. Friendica supports different social networking protocols and federates with Mastodon, Diaspora* and Pleroma and others.
  2. Being able to automatically post from Friendica to several social networks (even non-federated and even to your WordPress blog) e.g. important for people that cast on multiple social networks at once. This service alone is one that some people are willing to pay for.
  3. Being able to follow and discuss certain hashtags over multiple social networks. See 1). Important if you don’t want to miss anything 😉
  4. To setup a forum for a certain purpose for multiple people to join.
  5. Being able to fine tune the Stream (/network in Friendica) in great detail e.g following a person but not on every topic, collapse all the images or collapse all reshares. I wrote an earlier blog post about this: http://homehack.nl/filtering-options-in-the-friendica-social-network/

There also features that Friendica is missing.

  1. A link to a website doesn’t show a preview on my current Friendica server squeet.me. This is for some people a very important feature that’s missing.
  2. The upload limit for a photo can be lower depending on the server. On the popular server squeet.me it is 781.25Kb this is way lower than the 4.2 Mb of Diaspora*. I guess the message is to carefully choose a server for your account.

All additional features of Friendica come at a price, complexity of the UI. This is I think the reason that Friendica is harder to master than Diaspora. Diaspora fulfills the needs of most people and the simplicity of the interface is in fact one of the strong suits of this social network. Friendica on the other hand is more for power users or people that absolutely need one of the use cases mentioned above.

Full disclosure I used both Friendica and Diaspora* and currently I don’t prefer one over the other.

EDIT 01-02-2020: Unfortunately the Diaspora* pod that I was on has seized to exist and I didn’t create an account on another pod since there is to much overlap with Friendica for me.

EDIT 18-11-2022: I wrote again about Friendica now comparing it with Mastodon: https://homehack.nl/when-to-use-friendica-over-mastodon/

Categories
social

Filtering options in the Friendica social network

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.

Categories
social

Distributed social networks

Centralized networks

Chances are you have a Facebook, Twitter or Instagram account. All three very popular free (as in free beer) social networks that have something in common. They are centralized services owned by a single commercial entity and that entity wants to make profit. In fact they want to make as much profit as possible. Unfortunately this profit comes at a loss, your loss. The social networks gathers your data this is called data mining. This data is mined to create a profile of you to serve you ads. Also they sell your data to third parties and who knows what they’ll do with it.

Okay, you probably know this but what can you do about it? First, if you don’t care about all this you can stop reading and continue posting kitty pics on Facebook. If you do care please read on because there are good alternatives.  Alternatives that aren’t centralized, aren’t commercial, don’t maximize profit, in fact they don’t make a profit at all. Is this possible? Yes, welcome to the distributed social networks.

The federated universe better known as the Fediverse. Image taken from the Fediverse.party website which reads like a who is who in the Fediverse and has detailed information about the different social networks.

Distributed networks

Now what are distributed social networks? These networks are full featured social networks that do what social networks are supposed to do, enable you to interact socially over the internet, have a chat, have a conversation, discuss, blog and share. But the services are decentralized or distributed over distinct providers. Every provider maintains a server (or multiple servers) and interacts with the other distinct servers thus creating a joined service. Hence the name federated network also know by the name Fediverse.

The lack of a single commercial entity provides huge advantages for the user of the Fediverse.

  • Since there is no single owner it can’t mine your data. This means that the data is yours and not the owner’s. You decide what you want to share e.g in your profile and who you want to share it with. This ensures a better protection of your privacy.
  • No owner can decide to close the social network. This is what happened to G+. But even if a distinct provider of the Fediverse closes his server you can take your profile and move it to another server and continue like nothing happened.
  • No government can block the Fediverse nor can an ISP boycott the Fediverse. Remember what happened to Gab where ISP’s and other parties boycotted the service. An ISP can close a server but the Fediverse consists of thousands of distinct servers all around the world.
  • If your server doesn’t meet particular needs you can hop to another taking your data with you and never leave the social network. NOTE: this is not available for the Diaspora social network.
  • No ads. Servers of a distributed network cost money but this money doesn’t come from ads shown to the user. People that maintain the servers either pay this out of their own pocket or you can support them with donations (which I highly recommend).

With all these advantages you may be wondering who are these social networks and how can I get an account. For a full overview you can go to fediverse.party where you can find detailed information about more than ten social networks. I’ll mention the biggest four here:

  • Mastodon. By far the biggest of the federated networks. It’s a free, federated alternative to Twitter with a Tweetdeck like interface. A post, called a ‘toot’ can have a maximum of 500 characters.
  • Diaspora. In size second after Mastodon with a Facebook like interface but in terms of content more an anti-Facebook social network. Diaspora is lightweight making it very fast on even old PC’s.
  • Friendica. Diaspora and Mastodon use different communication protocols and can’t interact with each other. Friendica solves that by supporting several protocols. It can therefore serve as a hub to communicate with several networks. Apart from that Friendica could be considered as a Diaspora with additional features.
  • Hubzilla. Offers the same benefits as Friendica but uses some cutting edge features not present in Friendica. Probably beneficial for power users.

Conclusions

The Fediverse is a great place for social interaction. People in general are nice and the conversation are good. Yes they don’t have billions of users but it’s the quality of the interaction that counts. Sign up to one of these network, no strings attached guaranteed and allow yourself some time to get acquainted. If you don’t like it try another one. The experience differ greatly over the different social networks. I’m sure that after a while you’ll find the right network that you will call home.

Categories
open source social

Diaspora*, an alternative social network for GooglePlus

Why an alternative social network

Three weeks ago I wrote an article about the demise of G+ and I defined four criteria for an alternative social network. Based on these criteria I choose three social networks, Mastodon, MeWe and Diaspora* and signed up on them and promised to write about my experience with these three.

I will not write any further about MeWe since I already deleted the account after one week and wrote a post about it. So that leaves Mastodon and Diaspora*. This blog post is about my experience with Diaspora*.

Screenshot of the Diaspora* interface. Not flashy but very functional and fast.

What is Diaspora*

The shortest way to describe Diaspora* is it being a Facebook clone however this doesn’t do justice to Diaspora*. Although the user interface of Diaspora* has similarities with Facebook the network couldn’t be more different, kind of an anti-Facebook. First of all Diaspora* is free and open source software while Facebook is proprietary and Diaspora* is distributed while Facebook is centralized. The latter means that while Facebook is owned by a single entity that controls the entire network and it’s users Diaspora* has no owner and thus can never be controlled by a single organization or person. Instead Diaspora* consists of many servers (or pods) that have their own administrator. These servers are are all interconnected (or federated). Without going into details about how this works exactly being distributed has other notable advantages from a user point of view.

  • First of all Diaspora* doesn’t have ads  (it worth to note that some centralized social networks like G+ and MeWe also don’t have ads).
  • Diaspora* can’t be closed or sold.
  • There is no ‘built-in’ data-mining. While it can’t be excluded that some rogue administrator will use your data there is no ‘Diaspora* business model’ that would encourage this. Meaning that your privacy is better protected.

Working with Diaspora*

Being a user of G+ for several years I admit it took a little time to get used to the Diaspora* interface. Central is the ‘Stream’, a single column of posts of your contacts (followers in G+) and the hashtags (e.g #Linux) that you follow. Next is ‘My Activity’ which lists all posts that you liked, shared or commented on but also the posts that you wrote yourself. Lastly there is ‘Public activity’ that shows all public posts from the Diaspora* community. This also shows nudity or even porn but, as I noticed so far, this was always tagged with #nsfw which stands for ‘not suitable for work’. These #nsfw posts are not shown until the users clicks to open it. I think this is good solution to protect the user without censorship.

Conversations on Diaspora* are good and in-depth although it takes time to identify good contacts. After two weeks I have 29 contacts (on January 9 it was 50) of which half turns out to be what I consider good. Diaspora* provides the user with a good tool to ignore a contacts for instance if he or she turns out to be spammer. Diaspora* also allows for a private chat with an established contact which can be very handy.

Diaspora* doesn’t have the G+ equivalent of communities, a group of users sharing posts about a certain topic, and collections, a single users sharing posts about a single topic. These communities and collections can’t be mimicked by combined tags and aspects.

Conclusion

Diaspora* is, after Mastodon, the second biggest distributed social networks with the about 660.000 user accounts. Still a dwarf compared to Facebook but I’m not interested in the total number of users. I’m interested in the quality of the conversation and this is good, in fact it’s very good. People are mostly knowledgeable and helpful which guarantees meaningful chats. Just what I’m looking for.

I still prefer the G+ interface with multiple columns over the one column stream in Diaspora* because it saves a lot of scrolling however this seems like nitpicking. Overall the user interface of Diaspora* is straight forward and easy to work with.

The user has good control of the streams of information although I would have preferred the user to be able to combine tags and aspects. The reason for this is I want to be able to follow someone on certain topics instead of all his or her posts.

Diaspora* works surprisingly good on low-end machines. This is probably due to the minimal user interface. I consider this a big plus since I have a very old Thinkpad laptop that I use regularly.

Yes, my family and friends are not on Diaspora* but I don’t care about that in fact is a plus. I’d rather see them face to face anyway.

In conclusion Diaspora* starts to grow on me. I had a slow start with it but I’m gradually beginning to experience the strength of this well established and stable social network. I found Diaspora* very easy to use a plus that is not to be underestimated. The content that’s being shared is valuable and the conversations are excellent. For me that’s what counts when it comes to social networks.

EDIT: Diaspora* users can choose between a couple of Android apps. I choose Dandelior (which is the same app from the same developer as Dandelion) and I like it. Dandelior and Dandelion for Android can be downloaded from F-Droid.

EDIT: Diaspora* uses Markdown to format text making it an excellent choice for macro-blogging. Markdown appears to be more powerful than the editing features of G+. This and the single column stream are making Diaspora* an excellent choice for macro-blogging.