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 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, notifications, local timeline etc always had a certain appeal to me. However sometimes I get a bit overwhelmed with too many toots in my home feed not to mention the local timeline. During these times I take refuge to an old friend of mine, Friendica.
Friendica takes a somewhat different approach to the Fediverse than Mastodon. The first thing to catch the eye is that there is just one timeline 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 with different colors or even by choosing another theme (on my instance there are two, Frio and Vier). The combination of these two provides an experience that is currently easier for my eyes and mind.
Another important difference is that I’m easily able to create groups. These groups are called circles. 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 timeline 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.
Friendica allows the user to make visual changes to their timeline (see below). This keeps the timeline clean and compact.
And the list of features of Friendica goes on:
- Friendica wants you to be able to communicate with every one so besides ActivityPub it supports other protocols such as Diaspora*.
- An event calendar.
- And a very powerful text editor that uses the BBCode markup language to format postings and comments.
- To avoid that your timeline gets overwhelmed with long ramblings. Just the first few lines of a post can be shown. This is done with the “Show more” setting (Setting/Addons). Also when you like me don’t like to scroll through all the photos you can limit the maximum height of the post in pixels with “Show more dynamic (also Settings/Addons).
- The ability to create or join a forum (called a group). The group 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/X migrants.
- Last but not least, Friendica has an option to create and edit your own channel. This channel is than added to the channels already present by default on your instance. Just as an example let’s assume I want a channel with tech news in a certain language. I then select a language that I want plus a number of tags that interest me (e.g #electronics, #SBC). I can even provide multiple tags that I want excluded (#AI, #cloud) from the channel. After saving I can find the new channel between the other channels.
There are also features lacking in Friendica (or I couldn’t find them) that are available in Mastodon. Notably:
- No single button option to add a description to an image. Mastodon has this option to include visually impaired people. It’s possible in Friendica but you need to add it in the text editor. See https://wiki.friendi.ca/docs/image_description
- I can’t find an option to blur an image. In Mastodon this is a feature similar to a content warning for a text.
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 timeline 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 or circles. It’s also for people that want to stay in contact with people over different parts of the Fediverse (e.g both Mastodon and Diaspora*) and want to be able to keep these contacts manageable in one single timeline together with hashtags and RSS feeds.
Thanks for reading!