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:neuro: Pixy's Journey :v_bi: First of all, I apologise if you already know this, but there are so many who have been on Mastodon for much longer than you, and who don't know: If you want to follow Friendica users, you can do so from Mastodon. Even though Friendica and Mastodon are fundamentally different. You don't need a Friendica account just for that. You'd only need a Friendica account if you personally need Friendica's extra features.
First of all, why are they so different? Why are they so much different that it may cause friction with Mastodon? Why didn't they make Friendica more like Mastodon?
Because "they" (actually originally one man in Australia, now two guys in Germany) made it
before Mastodon. Friendica first came out in July, 2010. Mastodon first came out in January, 2016. Five and a half years later. And immediately when Mastodon was first released, it was federated with Friendica. And it has continuously been ever since then.
Also, Friendica has never aimed to be a full-on, all-out Facebook
clone. Its goal has always been to be "like Facebook, but better than Facebook". So it is different from Facebook. It doesn't look like Facebook, it doesn't feel like Facebook. It just does what Facebook does with extra stuff on top.
As Friendica is so much older than Mastodon and developed entirely independently from Mastodon, don't expect it to be anything like Mastodon either. Half of what you know about Mastodon you can toss out of the window when you join Friendica and re-learn it.
Now, the first difference between Mastodon and Friendica is: Mastodon being like Twitter means that it's
social media. It's about
following accounts and consuming their content, it's about others following your account and consuming your content.
Friendica is like Facebook. It's true
social networking. It's about
people connecting with people. Even though Friendica has adopted the "follower" and "followed" wording from Mastodon, its default is still the bidirectional connection. Maybe you still remember that you didn't follow people on Facebook, and they didn't follow you back, thus creating two unidirectional connections. You didn't have followers, you didn't follow,
you had "friends" which always went into both directions.
"Social networking" also means that on Friendica, much unlike on Mastodon, you don't follow people because of their content first and foremost. Friendica is more geared towards connecting with people because of their profiles. A Mastodon profile has not even half a dozen text fields. A Friendica profile has
well over a dozen. Including a dedicated text field for keywords.
This contributes to the directory being much, much more useful on Friendica than on Mastodon. You can search the Friendica directory for names. You can search it for keywords. It comes with a keyword cloud. And it has a "suggestion" mode in which Friendica matches other profiles with yours.
So you're into dogs. You add "dogs" to your keyword field. Someone else has "dogs" in their keyword field. And what do you know, they slide up your list of suggestions! Also, I guess (I've been out of Friendica for many years, using two of its surviving descendants instead; this comment comes from
Hubzilla) that connections of your connections move to the top of the suggestions, too. Just like on Facebook. Key feature on everything that's truly social networking.
There's even a
central Friendica directory.
Discussions on Friendica are better than on Mastodon. That's because Friendica, just like Facebook, like Tumblr, like a blog, like a forum, like almost everything that isn't Twitter or Mastodon, has threaded conversations. It's fully aware of entire threads. A conversation is not loosely tied together from posts and more posts like on Mastodon. Instead, it's an enclosed object with exactly one post. The start post. And otherwise any number of comments. Which are totally not posts.
Now, what does that mean in practice? Let's play through a conversation that entirely happens on Friendica.
Imagine you're connected with Alice. Alice posts something. You receive Alice's post on your stream (= timeline).
Bob comments. You are not connected with Bob. Bob doesn't mention you. In fact, Bob doesn't mention
anyone. But still, Alice knows about Bob's comment because it's listed as an unread activity. And you know about Bob's comment, too, because it's listed as an unread activity for you as well.
By the way: Unread activities. Another thing that doesn't exist on Mastodon. On Mastodon, you read your unread stuff by scrolling and scrolling and scrolling through your timeline and scrolling some more until either you hit the stuff that you've already read, or until you've got no more time and/ore spoons to read any more. If the latter, there'll inevitably be a whole lot of toots that you'll never know about. On Friendica, you have a counter and a list of posts and comments that you have not read yet. And you can go through it by and by, until there's nothing anymore that's unread. Luckily, Friendica doesn't show you posts and comments one by one, but it always shows you entire threads.
Okay, back to the conversation: Carol comments on Bob's comment on Alice's post. Carol only mentions Bob to make sure that she's replying to Bob rather than directly to Alice. Again, the mention is not needed for Bob to see her comment. She doesn't mention Alice either, she doesn't mention you, and you aren't connected with Carol.
But yet again, Carol's comment is listed as an unread activity.
Now you want to check Alice's post, Bob's comment and Carol's comment. Again, you don't have to check them one by one. If you click either, Friendica will show you the whole conversation at once. Like a post on Facebook with comments below. Like a blog post with comments below. And it will mark Alice's post, Bob's comment and Carol's comment as flagged.
This is how conversations should be. Always. You have a post on your stream, you get
all the comments on it. At least all that come in after you've received the post.
But Friendica goes even further: It has groups. Discussion groups. Like forums. It has always had them. I mean, Facebook has always had groups, too, right? Basically, after you've joined a group, you receive all posts from that group plus all comments under these posts. And if you post to a group, everyone in the group receives your post. All without fumbling around with hashtags and hoping people on other instances happen upon your post by searching for that hashtag.
Now you may say that Mastodon has Guppe groups. Yeah, but they're a glued-on hack made by someone who probably thought the Fediverse is only Mastodon. They can't be searched for whereas
the Friendica directory also lists public groups. Speaking of public groups, they can be private. As in, outsiders can't see the profile, outsiders can't see the posts in the group, and they aren't listed in any directory. Also, Friendica groups can be moderated. Guppe groups can't.
What else? Posts. You can
do more in a post on Friendica than you can
see on Mastodon.
Vanilla Mastodon is limited to 500 characters. It can be raised, but not by configuration. Raising the limit requires hacking into the source code and usually having to do so after each Mastodon upgrade.
Friendica, as far as I know, is "limited" to 200,000 characters. At the same time, as far as I know, Mastodon rejects posts from outside if they're longer than 100,000 characters. Friendica lets you write posts that are so long that Mastodon refuses to even import them.
Friendica supports all kinds of text formatting. Mastodon can display bold type, italics, maybe underline, also bullet-point lists, quotes (it still can't display quote-posts which Friendica has had from the get-go as well), well, and that's about it. Friendica can
create all this and more. Much more. If you can do it in a blog post, you can do it on Friendica. Maybe even more than that.
A very good example is how Friendica handles images. Mastodon can only handle images as file attachments and only four of these. If you only know Mastodon, you perceive this as the one and only Fediverse standard, and you can barely imagine that it could possibly be any different. That's because Mastodon can only handle images with these limitations in content from outside as well.
Friendica, on the other hand, is not limited in how many pictures you can have in a post. And it can actually have pictures
in a post. Embedded within the post. With text above the picture and more text below the picture and another picture below that text and so forth. Just like a blog.
Since Mastodon refuses to render embedded in-line images, Friendica actually has to additionally convert all imported images into file attachments which Mastodon understands. But even then, Mastodon will throw all of them away except four if you have more than four.
How does Friendica do that? Well, part of the secret is because Friendica has its own cloud file space built into each account. If you upload an image to Mastodon, it ends up somewhere where you can't access it. If you upload an image to Friendica, it ends up in your cloud file space. With its own little file manager. Which even supports folders and subfolders.
In fact, Friendica even has image gallery functionality!
That said, as Friendica is so much different from Mastodon, and particularly, since it's so much older than Mastodon, it has its own culture which is rooted in a) its vast set of features and b) the early 2010s. Friendica has never adopted Mastodon culture, and it never will. That's because Mastodon culture clashes so much with Friendica's native culture and with Friendica's features.
For example, Friendica users happily churn out posts and comments which at least some Mastodon users perceive as so long that they're disturbing. Namely over 500 characters long. Ask a Friendica user to chop their long posts into threads with never over 500 characters, and you will not receive.
Friendica users do stuff in their posts that Mastodon won't render. This includes embedding images and more than four. If Mastodon won't render them, then from a Friendica point of view, it doesn't mean that Friendica is using some non-standard freak feature that should be avoided. It rather means that Mastodon is broken. And if the Mastodon devs refuse to fix it, then Mastodon is broken by design.
This may come as a surprise to you, but: Mastodon's CW field was not invented from scratch as a CW field. Originally, it's a summary field. It's a summary field on Laconi.ca/StatusNet/GNU social. It's a summary field on Friendica (where it's called "abstract"). It's a summary field on everything that came after Friendica. But in 2017, someone proposed to make it a CW field on Mastodon. Ever since then, everyone on Mastodon "knows" that this field is purpose-made for CWs and for CWs only.
Again, on Friendica, it's for summaries. Friendica users either use it for a summary (and even then, this involves a pair of BBcode tags), or they don't use it at all.
At the same time, Friendica historically, and to this day, handles CWs differently: It generates them on the reader's side. Automatically and only if you want to. For this, it has an optional, very basic filter-like feature named "NSFW" that comes with not much more than a keyword list. If a keyword from that list is in a post or a comment or a PM, the whole thing will be automatically hidden behind a button. Much like a Mastodon CW, but unlike a Mastodon CW, it's only rendered for you (and everyone else who has that keyword on the list) and not forced upon everyone all the same.
(By the way: Mastodon has introduced the self-same functionality to its filters with the release of Mastodon 4.0 in October, 2022. But even though this was right before the biggest Twitter-to-Mastodon migration wave ever, nobody knows about this.)
This leads to culture clash:
- Mastodon users are disturbed because Friendica users don't add CWs to sensitive content.
- Mastodon users are extra disturbed because Friendica users "spam" their posts with hashtags. These hashtags are used to trigger the generation of reader-side CWs which are not part of Mastodon's culture because nobody knows they exist, and because they didn't exist in mid-2022 when Mastodon's culture was (re-)defined.
- Mastodon users are extra special disturbed because Friendica users "misuse" the CW fields for "like, titles or summaries or whatever that stuff is".
- Friendica users are disturbed because Mastodon users misuse the abstract field for CWs without even adding an actual abstract.
- Friendica users are extra disturbed because Mastodon users don't add keywords or hashtags to trigger their NSFW.
Also, Mastodon users mute or block Friendica users because they post over 500 characters at once. In turn, I know at least one Friendica user who blocks everyone upon first strike who chops a longer post into a thread with never more than 500 characters in one message. Friendica users are perfectly used to posts with 10,000 characters, but they find the same posts cut into threads with over two dozen tiny posts cumbersome and tiring.
Before mid-January, 2025, accessibility didn't play any role on Friendica. The old Friendica guard saw alt-text as another dumb fad from Mastodon's stupid and ignorant culture that perceives the Fediverse as only Mastodon. Not to mention that adding alt-text to images on Friendica is still kind of cumbersome because next to nobody has ever actually considered using that feature until very recently.
Interestingly, Zuckerberg's further enshittification of Facebook which triggered a slow but steady migration wave from Facebook to Friendica also coincided with the very first time ever that a Friendica veteran (the same guy who blocks thread posters) was asked to add alt-text to an image. Which must have been a rather disturbing experience for him.
Another cultural difference concerns connections with other software and platforms. Still today, over half of all Mastodon users think the Fediverse is only Mastodon. And truth be told, many many Mastodon users would love the Fediverse to actually be only Mastodon. Anything that connects with Mastodon and sends content to Mastodon is seen as rogue, culture-less intruders.
On Friendica, in a stark contrast, connection with anything and everything has been an integral part of the concept, of the philosophy and thus of the culture from the very beginning on.
Friendica doesn't only communicate through ActivityPub which it didn't even support until 2019 (it also has its own protocol, DFRN). Even then, it has a much more complete and standard-compliant ActivityPub implementation than Mastodon.
It can also connect do diaspora*, another much less feature-rich "Facebook killer" from later in 2010 which refuses to support any protocol other than its own, and which actually doesn't aim to federate with anything else (all the cross-project federation work was entirely done on Friendica's side). If you've been intensively using Friendica for at least a year or two, it's absolutely normal to have contacts on diaspora*.
It's also one of the very last Fediverse projects that still support OStatus, the old protocol used by GNU social, formerly StatusNet.
It can integrate Bluesky accounts so you can connect to Bluesky without the Bridgy Fed bridge and without Bridgy Fed's limitations. It can integrate Tumblr accounts. It could theoretically still integrate 𝕏 accounts if the node admin had the millions for an API license. In the early 2010s, it was even able to integrate Facebook accounts. It can natively crosspost to WordPress and Libertree.
It can subscribe to RSS and Atom feeds while generating Atom feeds itself. It can communicate via e-mail. And its chat has at least basic XMPP compatibility.
Friendica's credo is something like, "If it exists, we federate." Mastodon's credo rather seems to be something like, "There's Mastodon, there's evil, there's broken, and there's both broken and evil. If it isn't Mastodon, it'd better not disturb us."
In fact, most Mastodon users barely notice the Fediverse outside Mastodon, also because they barely identify content from outside of Mastodon as such. Another reason why they try to force Mastodon's culture upon non-Mastodon users: They don't even notice that these aren't Mastodon users at all.
Friendica users are fully aware of how colourful the Fediverse is, also because Friendica's Web UI actually tells you where a post or a comment came from. They still find the behaviour of many Mastodon users disturbing and tiring. But they're more aware that Mastodon has its own culture, and they don't try to force Friendica's culture upon users of something that isn't even technologically fit to adopt Friendica's culture.
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