2025-05-13 09:49:12
2025-01-16 17:35:48
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Fediverse Tumblr equivalents
Tumblr always suited me better than micro-blogging as there is no word count restriction (I can find brevity a problem) and you could have any number of blogs/channels for whatever topic was tickling your fancy at the time.
So I've been keeping an eye out for Fediverse alternatives, jotting down notes and now I'd like throw this open to the Hivemind. ~~And yes, Tumblr is now on ActivityPub, but I am not putting my time into corporate platforms again.~~ edit: oh no it isn't, that was the plan (as if December 2023) but there's been no updates since Tumblr moved to WordPress.
Added bonuses: markdown (or something similar), adding links to posts, quoting other posts and perhaps being able to login from another Fediverse service.
Here's a few I found:
- Goblin - It's a FireFish fork from a former Tumblr employee. Allows multiple accounts but they have to have a different email address, some markdown but not links. I've heard it suggested that most *key forks could be set-up as a Tumblr alternative
- Loforo: "Another surprise is that Loforo is the second most active ActivityPub blog platform in the Fediverse, behind only WordPress." Easy multiple blog creation, formatting in HTML. Unfortunately you can't create your own instance, last time I checked.
- micro.blog - not free, not open source
- Wafrn
Not listed as Tumblr equivalents but some of the general services are flexible enough to do this:
- Hubzilla - has channels but seems more a CMS. Nomadic identities is a great feature.
- Friendica - the BlueSky integration seems increasingly important and, with Meta's enshittification, it feels like a general social media service is a good idea. The way you can have the equivalent of Google+'s circles seems a good feature (while I am no fan of Facebook, Google+ worked well for me while it lasted). The main issue I see is you can only replicate channels with different accounts.
Any suggestions? Have I missed any key features from the above?
GitHub - johnHackworth/goblin
Contribute to johnHackworth/goblin development by creating an account on GitHub.GitHub
Features
- Post “Status Updates”
- Photos, albums, tagging, privacy
- Events Calendar
- Show different profiles to different people/communities
- Privacy with military encryption
- Relationship Control (Follow and or share only)
- Browse posts by protocol (RSS, Twitter, OStatus, ActivityPub)
- Following contacts and hashtags
- Themes and Addons
- Federation to Diaspora, Mastodon, Pleroma, Hubzilla, GNU Social, WordPress, Nextcloud, Pixelfed, PeerTube, OStatus, ActivityPub, Twitter, RSS, Buffer, etc
- Panel for User- and Systemadministration
Timelines
- Network Timeline – Posts of your contacts or post of the hashtags you are following
- Profile / Personal wall – Posts that you have created
- Community Page – Posts that are available on your node, consisting of public posts created from users of your node and public posts of contacts or hashtags users of your node are following
- Different sorting views
- Groups – you can put contacts in individual groups to just read their posts
- Comments and multiple posts are collapsed to the most recent (these may be expanded)
Posts & Status Updates
- “Unlimited” text length – many sites will allow up to 200k characters per post.
- Rich text supported – bold, italics, decoration, color, size, etc
- Paragraph formatting – tables, code blocks, quotations, etc
- Sharing of public posts (except private posts e.g. for closed group of recipients)
- Edit your posts after they have been published
- Oembed embedding support
- Media support includes Photos, Audio, Video, Embeds, Links, Youtube, Vimeo, SoundCloud, File Attachments and more
- Location/Geotagging Option for posts. Setting default location, using browser location setting or using an addon for random locations
- Common tag formats supported including @mentions and #hashtags
- Likes and dislikes
- Threadstyle Commenting
- Multiple deletion (delete all selected items)
- Seamless wall-to-wall posts and remote comments, even across different network nodes
- Notes to self – maintain your own private notebook
- Sending a post as email for non friendica users
Direct Messaging
- Network ’email’ – provides ‘one-to-one’ private messaging to any Friendica or Diaspora, Mastodon, Pleroma or any other network member
Distributed Forums
- Public Forums – where everybody, even anonymous can read and join the discussion
- Private Forums – members need to be accepted be the forum owner or moderators. Discussions are not public and only visible to validated members
Privacy & Group control
- Private conversation groups – on these pages all communications are restricted to group members – similar to Google+ “circles” or Diaspora “aspects”
- Visual group editor to manage the members of private conversation groups
- All items controlled by access lists (individuals and groups – allow and deny
- Individuals may belong to more than one group
Photo & Media Management
- Upload Manager
- Tagging of photos
- Privacy Support – defining access to photos across network nodes
- Location and other private information embedded in uploaded photos from cell phones is stripped
Event Calendar
- Create distributed Events with Date, Time, Location, Description
- React with an Attendance Action like accept, decline or unsure
- Birthday notifications – timezone corrected so that if you are in New York and I am in Moscow you won’t get the birthday greeting on the wrong day.
- Personal and shared events in calendar
Profiles & Multiple Profiles
- Create different profiles to present to different people/communities
- Private profiles with controlled visibility. You can maintain completely different personality profiles visible only to specific people.
- Multiple profiles for example:
- Profile with your phone number and address for your friends and family
- Profile for the rest of the world with you email address only
- Existing profiles may be cloned to create similar profiles which only differ in minor details
- Visual editor allows you to select which friends can view which profile
- Many profile information sections and categories
- Anonymous profile viewing (any of your content and/or profile information) can be disabled
- Publishing your profile to network directories (site and global) is individually controllable
Relationship Control
- Follow contacts all over the fediverse
- “Follow” RSS Feeds – Arbitrary websites and blogs may be imported into your social stream via RSS/Atom feeds
- Sites can restrict friendships based on protocol, email addresses, and DNS location
- Fan (one-way) relationships are fully supported
- Create community profiles for large special interest groups / Forums
- Automatic contact suggestions
- Any contact can be blocked completely or quietly “ignored”
- Match people based on interests in the friendica directory
- Suggest / recommend existing friends to other friends
Themes, Addons & Apps
- Different Themes (Frio, Vier, DuopuntoZero ..)
- Stylesheets / Schemes to change the default look of some Themes (dark, light, colorfull, etc)
- Addons – FromApp, ShowMore, etc
- Addons – Twitter, Tumblr, GNU Social, pump.io, libertree, Blogger, WordPress
- Supports ‘Apps’ which are third-party plugin applications such as games or utilities
- Email contacts and communications supported (two-way) via IMAP4rev1/ESMTP
- OpenID Support
- Gravatar Support
- OExchange link sharing supported
- Portable Contacts Webstandard provides informationwiki. about friends between allowed sites using a standards-compliant format.
- OpenSearch provider interface for supported browser search engines
Mobile & Third Party clients
- Basic Twitter/GNU Social API provides easy access from a growing number of mobile and third party applications (Twidere, AndStatus, Bitlbee, Choqok, Frentcl, Gwibber, Hotot, IdentiCurse, Pidgin/Purple, Mustard, Pino, TTYtter, and more)
- Clients for Android, SailfishOS and Windows
System & Administration
- Decentralized architecture with no central authority or ownership
- Member directory, that respects all your individual privacy settings
- Administration interface with site settings, addon administration, log file management and member management
- Public Community page as a site representation provides recent public posts from across the site (respects all privacy controls)
- Server-to-server encryption Support
- Optionally “expire” old content after a certain period of time. The content is also removed from all other Friendica servers which might be holding a copy
- Language selector (or automatic detection) with a growing list of supported translations
- Message queuing and redelivery for reliable communications
- Built-in Help and Documentation
System Requirements
- Platform: PHP7+ / MySQL / Apache / nginx
- License: AGPL3
- Cost: FREE
This entry was edited (11 months ago)
astro_ray
in reply to ᴇᴍᴘᴇʀᴏʀ 帝 • • •How about misskey? It has character limit, but still you can write a lot (2000 character limit). There are also channels.
You can give it a try and see if it is for you.
Kichae
in reply to astro_ray • • •ᴇᴍᴘᴇʀᴏʀ 帝
in reply to astro_ray • • •caos
in reply to ᴇᴍᴘᴇʀᴏʀ 帝 • • •The Channels in Friendica are similar to the "antennas" / "newspickers" in Misskey / Sharkey. Both are very good ways to receive content sorted by self-defined topics.
If you are looking for a way to *send *to different topics, Friendica's (connected) "accounts" would be suitable for this, But Hubzilla offers more options for this
Friendica offers a connector for Tumblr as well as for Bluesky. Ad hoc I can only find a German-language manual for it: friendica-hilfe.gitbook.io/fri…
Bluesky, Tumblr und weitere social Media Dienste | Friendica Hilfe
friendica-hilfe.gitbook.ioᴇᴍᴘᴇʀᴏʀ 帝
in reply to caos • • •That's good to hear. I have a test account on a *key fork and the Antennas are a great feature.
The naming of things is so tricky when comparing different services. I stumbled across one Friendica request to rename "forums" to "groups" and "groups" to "circles".
... show moreYeah, that was my understanding - Hubzilla has that feature working as I'd like it but there's a way to make it work in Friendica.
That's good to hear. I have a test account on a *key fork and the Antennas are a great feature.
The naming of things is so tricky when comparing different services. I stumbled across one Friendica request to rename "forums" to "groups" and "groups" to "circles".
Yeah, that was my understanding - Hubzilla has that feature working as I'd like it but there's a way to make it work in Friendica.
Thanks for digging that out, it being in German might explain why I didn't find it.
That all sounds ideal and working through Bluesky's API. I now wonder why we need bridges if that works so well.
Bluesky, Tumblr und weitere social Media Dienste | Friendica Hilfe
friendica-hilfe.gitbook.iopoVoq
in reply to ᴇᴍᴘᴇʀᴏʀ 帝 • • •like this
Pamasich likes this.
Kichae
in reply to poVoq • • •TheFederatedPipe
in reply to poVoq • • •wakest ⁂
in reply to ᴇᴍᴘᴇʀᴏʀ 帝 • • •ᴇᴍᴘᴇʀᴏʀ 帝
in reply to wakest ⁂ • • •wakest ⁂
in reply to ᴇᴍᴘᴇʀᴏʀ 帝 • • •ᴇᴍᴘᴇʀᴏʀ 帝
in reply to wakest ⁂ • • •flamingos-cant (hopepunk arc)
in reply to ᴇᴍᴘᴇʀᴏʀ 帝 • • •Is it? I know it's been moved to Wordpress, but I haven't heard about this.
Ghost can apparently be used to manage multiple blogs under different subdomains. Might be worth looking into when their ActivityPub supports goes out of early access.
How can I use one single ghost instance to support multiple blogs at the same time ?
Ghost Forumᴇᴍᴘᴇʀᴏʀ 帝
in reply to flamingos-cant (hopepunk arc) • • •Good point. Last updates were they were still working on it in December 2023 but the move to WP seems to have either derailed the efforts or forced it to switch tracks.
I'm seeing Ghost as a Substack killer, as that is a toxic swamp we need sensible folk off. Nearly everyone who had a newsletter migrated there. Only one listened to their fans and backed straight out again.
flamingos-cant (hopepunk arc)
in reply to ᴇᴍᴘᴇʀᴏʀ 帝 • • •I always thought a newsletter was just a specialised blog, but maybe that's wrong. I heard about the Substack allowing Nazis on there, so understandable why people would want off.
katy ✨
in reply to ᴇᴍᴘᴇʀᴏʀ 帝 • • •