Jerry on PieFed

Just curious. Have you had trouble loading my-place.social?

They never explained well how to use Friendica, so it’s all guessing. But, I believe, to get a Facebook-like experience, you mark people as “Friends” who you want in a Facebook-like environment. This maps to “Friends” on Facebook. Then you click on the “Friends” circle, and you only see posts and conversations from your friends.

You can also set up groups that federate to other instances, and you can control access to the groups. I’ve never used it, so I don’t completely understand how to do this.

But, I think these are the 2 closest Friendica features for Facebook emulation.

https://wiki.friendi.ca/docs/groups-and-privacy#groups_and_privacy

and

The stalls are because the database queries are suboptimal. There is one that occasionally runs that, on my instance (I have 337 active users), can sometimes run for 15 minutes and will lock tables. Everything stalls and backs up.

This query was discussed, and I believe in the next release (but unsure) it will be replaced. Instead of using a ton of “not in” clauses, it does a left join now. In testing, someone mentioned it went from multi minutes to multi seconds to run. But there are a lot more such queries.

I think what Friendica needs desperately is a MariaDB/MySql expert to clean up the queries.

Because Friendica supports groups, you can connect to Lemmy communities. This is what kills Freindica. It just cannot handle the hundreds of thousands of daily connections that come in just from lemmy.world alone. Basically, it then becomes a Lemmy/Piefed/MBIN instance plus a Mastodon instance. The database grows by leaps and bounces, queues back up, and it stalls. CPU pegs without relief.

On mine, I finally had to block the Lemmy User Agent at the Cloudflare firewall. I calculated I would have had to spend another $500/month to allow the server to handle the Lemmy traffic comfortably, excluding the continuing cost for DB space. So far, I haven’t blocked Piefed and MBIN, but this could change.

Friendica groups were designed for small private groups or specialized groups. Not public forums. I don’t think they ever anticipated someone connecting to Lemmy.world communities and that such groups would become so active. I’ve told people on my instance that if they want to connect to these groups, they should use Piefed/Lemmy/Mbin, not Friendica.

I haven’t looked at the code, but it’s standard PHP so probably not terribly hard for PHP developers to get involved.

The developers still work on it, are active in the support groups, and answer questions, but they just can’t put in the time they used to. I’m sure they’d be happy if someone wanted to get involved. But, I don’t think it would need to be taken over, just helped.

It’s an acquired taste. Now that I’ve been using it for months, I prefer it. I like that I have my Bluesky and Tumblr posts completely integrated into my timeline. I can reply to Bluesky posts. When I post something, it automatically gets posted to Bluesky, and Tumblr, if I like. I never go onto Bluesky any longer. Likes and replies from Bluesky are right in with my Mastodon posts and RSS feed posts too. Yes, RSS integrates in as well (obviously you can’t reply to them though).

On Mastodon, if someone posts something interesting and I want to see replies and discussions, I can’t, unless I remember to go back to the post and look. In Friendica I can click that I want to follow the thread, and it will notify me of the updates, and take me right to the new comment when I click it, it takes me directly to the notification. I love this! If I interact with a post (like it), same thing. It will track it for me. And it does a better job of pulling in replies and responses from all over.

Yeah. Not all good.

I run one of the Friendica servers and it’s a problem child. The database grows rapidly and struggles. The database queries urgently need work. Some are super slow. It stalls a lot. The UI is confusing. The developers are not all that active any longer, but still active. The UI is, well, dated.

More info about it here: https://news.elenarossini.com/the-future-of-social-is-here-a-show-and-tell-part-3-friendica/

This is fantastic news!

Yep, it’s enabled now on https://feddit.online/

Coincidentally, there’s this post today about Yunohost: https://my-place.social/display/db471d1f-c06c03be288f78d7-ad573aef

@_elena@mastodon.social

Elena Rossini, well known for her help in growing the Fediverse, raves about Yunohost, https://news.elenarossini.com/my-year-of-fediverse-explorations/. You should be fine using it.

@_elena@mastodon.social

Jerry’s post says he blocked 2 others. Other than lemmy.ml, what were the other 2?

I tried translating something before posting it to the same language (Thai) and apparently nobody understood what I was talking about. But enough people understood English, so at least some people would have understood me if I just posted it in English. The others could try translating.

Responding in English, if this is your language, is not Anglo domination. A lot of people learn English as a second language, so many know it. If you translate to Japanese and post it, then when people translate it to English, or Spanish, whatever, it will make no sense whatsoever.

When I traveled to France, a Middle Eastern family came into the restaurant and asked for the English menu. They couldn’t read the French menu. But they knew enough English. That’s when I realized that restaurants in France offered English menus, not for Westerners, but because more people in the world were likely to understand it rather than French.

I post in English. Translating from English to Spanish is better than English to Japanese to Spanish.

Well said

I see no legitimate reason for not using a User Agent string, like all the other crawlers use, other than the desire to hide the crawler and make it difficult to block.

I don’t accept his explanation. I see it as gaslighting.