When to use Friendica over Mastodon


in reply to serenity

@serenity@jeremmy.ml wrote:

* 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.

Have you tried BBCodes? while in your node press on your profile name in the top-right corner of your screen (if you're using the Frio theme) > Help > BBCode tag reference to see what you can do. They can do everything you said.

in reply to Cătă 🇷🇴🇺🇦🇲🇩🇪🇺

Thanks for the info about BBCode. I didn’t know about this option before. However I can’t figure out how to implement some of it. I was testing out alt text and am pretty sure I was formatting the BBCode properly. Once I created the post, it would display the image but I could never figure out how to view the alt text. Do you know how to implement it?
in reply to Sam

@Sam Guess it shows up when the image does not load properly. Or when you hover your cursor over the image. Usually if you type [img=some/url/to/an/image]alt_text[/img] should work just fine. That's what I do at least.

Edit: here's an example (edit2: there is an image below, but it is only visible on Friendica; maybe because it is on a different server):

You should see a black cat in here, but if you can read this alt text, you'll have a lucky day

Also use the preview pane/button before posting a comment, so you can make adjustments if something goes wrong. In my experience, lists do not work properly unless you use * to make lists, as Friendica does support markdown as well. However, it turns markdown into bbcode, so if I have to edit a comment with a list, I have to switch back to Markdown formatting there.

@Sam
This entry was edited (Tuesday, January 24, 2023, 10:22 PM)
in reply to Шуро

Is it? Really? Easier for non-technical users than Markdown?

Most simple markup languages (djot, markdown, asciidoc, textile, etc.) are based on 7-bit ASCII markup that people have been using in email and SMS for decades. They're compact and straightforward. BBCode is a bastardization (I use that in its technical sense more than as a pejorative) of HTML; it's verbose and unintuitive.

Give a non-technical person with no other information a keyboard and a plain text field and ask them to emphasize a word in some text. I'll bet the first thing they do is all caps. If you ask them to do it without caps, I bet you'll get something like surrounding the text in asterisks or hashmarks, but regardless, what you won't get is bracket-B-bracket followed by a closing tag.

BBCode is just straight-up HTML for people allergic to pointy characters. That's hardly non-technical.

SirQuacksALot doesn't like this.

in reply to 𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍

I have different opinion on this but I am not UX specialist.

Surely to just highlight something it is easier to use underscore or similar characters but when you want to have variety of formatting styles in my opinon text tags are easier to remember and use. Yes, more to type but BBCode-enabled solutions usually provide some sort of assist.

Also Markdown tends to conflict with user input more often which is confusing.

This entry was edited (Wednesday, January 25, 2023, 9:49 PM)

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Unknown parent

It's not even sorta fast, but I've found it to be the most functional for me out of the bunch. In addition to Friendica, I've played around with Diaspora, Mastadon, Pleroma, Misskey, plus the forks Calckey and Akkoma. Friendica's ability to easily follow tags and rss feeds, plus the lemmy and diaspora integration, as well as the ease of import/export really shows where some of the others are lacking. That said, UI/UX customization in Friendica leaves quite a bit to be desired.

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in reply to serenity

rom doesn't like this.

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in reply to Poliverso - notizie dal Fediverso ⁂

This entry was edited (Tuesday, January 24, 2023, 9:36 PM)
in reply to Cătă 🇷🇴🇺🇦🇲🇩🇪🇺

Friendica and Hubzilla are a bit hard to learn. These platforms need better onboarding process. The greatest advantage of Mastodon is that it is pretty familiar and doesn't overwhelm with features.

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in reply to casey is remote

@casey is remote Really not sure, Misskey is microblogging as well, maybe? And both rebased and Misskey are newer projects, while Friendica is older and more established? Maybe you want to have a Facebook experience like in the heydays?

I want to keep the number of accounts I have to a minimum, but I might create some dummy accounts on any of these platforms to test them out.

@Poliverso notizie dal fediverso @serenity

don't like this

in reply to serenity

@serenity Well, I feel great that I can post and comment to Reddit with my FB account in this regard, haha ;)

I am really afraid of not doxxing myself though, haha. On the former I am more vocal usually, while on the latter I am more personal. So now I have a mix of social identities that I use for both being vocal and personal.

in reply to Anders Rytter Hansen

@Anders Rytter Hansen I remember you had, I can't remember, someone posted something on the Friendica support group, not sure if it was you or anyone else.

Yea, I had the same issue as you. Indeed, federation between Friendica and Lemmy servers seems a bit problematic, I still search for my posts and comments on a separate Lemmy tab, unfortunately, don't know if this is a Lemmy/Friendica issue or just related to ActivityPub, as f00fc7c8@libranet.de was saying in a previous comment. I am surprised that this comment made it through w/o such an input from my end, so wow! :D

servers@serenity@jeremmy.ml

in reply to Cătă 🇷🇴🇺🇦🇲🇩🇪🇺

and this one made it as well, right? :D

I solved the issue by spinning up my own instance :D it seems like a Libranet/Venera problem rather than a Friendica problem, because now it works fine for me.

in reply to Anders Rytter Hansen

@Anders Rytter Hansen wow, speechless. I guess you never know where the problem comes from, haha.

I previously tried to force-load my initial comment to this post as well, but nothing happened, wherever I tried. :D

in reply to Anders Rytter Hansen

@anders@rytter.me wrote:

indeed but at least i have access to the logs now if the same or something else will happen again 😁

That really is an advantage, congrats on your new server, haha! :D

@anders@rytter.me wrote:

you mean force load by searching?

Yes
This entry was edited (Tuesday, January 24, 2023, 10:38 PM)
in reply to Cătă 🇷🇴🇺🇦🇲🇩🇪🇺

thank you :D

i see. in my experience it worked with the link but it seemed like Lemmy users didnt get notifications when i did it and there for didnt reply.

anyways it works now (out of the blue) so thats great! :D

in reply to Шуро

@Александр You can embed audio and video though, if it is uploaded to a different server and is publicly available. Here's a random slice of pie from duckduckgo images to prove it (edit: there is a picture with a slice of pie below, but Lemmy does not show it):
A slice of pie

@serenity

This entry was edited (Tuesday, January 24, 2023, 10:23 PM)
in reply to eshep

I tried to import/move my profile to my own instance but I got an error saying page not found :S did you succeed with that`?

I agree with what you say. Is your experience that Friendica is slower than the others? My guess would be that Friendica is programmed in PHP which executes slower than other programming languages.

in reply to Anders Rytter Hansen

I am not sure it is about PHP but it depends how you see it.

Friendica can be rather resource-intensive, especially for public instance. Some of them feel slow because they are somewhat overloaded. On badly overloaded servers delivery times suffer.

Also mostly static interface of Friendica which I like also means most operations reload the entire page. E.g. when you go to someone's profile it can take the same time (say 8 seconds) on Friendica and Misskey/Pleroma/Mastodon but on the latter you don't see the page redrawn - it stays the same and something spins loading the data. On Friendica you see full page reload. It is perceived slower.

Also in some aspects Friendica is inherently slower by design. E.g. when posting comment on Mastodon it is fired off right away (well, almost), on Friendica it is queued for delivery and the worker runs on interval (usually every 2-5 mins). It isn't a problem but feels more like email or old school forum while other platforms can feel more like instant messaging.

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in reply to Шуро

@Александр

@serenity @rom @eshep @F00FC7C8 likes to infodump @Fediverse

Good observations. Another thing about full page reload is that it will also put more load on the server.

On my Friendica server I am running the Daemon instead of Cronjob so for me it gets sent immediately :)

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in reply to Шуро

@Александр

@serenity @Fediverse @rom @eshep @F00FC7C8 likes to infodump @Александр

You start the Daemon with this command: cd /var/www/html && php bin/daemon.php start

If you don't have your Friendica installation in /var/www/html, change it to the proper location. You can run the command at system boot.

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in reply to Anders Rytter Hansen

@serenity

@Fediverse @rom @eshep @F00FC7C8 likes to infodump @Александр

I assume that you don't run it through Docker since you mentioned Cronjobs. Let me know if my assumption is wrong because then I can give some extra suggestions for that as well.

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in reply to jay91

@jay91 You can create forums, which are, practically, like fb groups. In fact, Lemmy communities appear as forums as well. Hell, you can even set your account as a news organization:
imgur.com/7wVSTRe.png
Types of account on Friendica

@serenity

don't like this

in reply to serenity

IMO Friendica feels like beta software or outdated with no signs of improvement. Similar to how LibreOffice used to be for years. The layout is just not streamlined enough. It's unnecessary complicated and the UI looks outdated on all themes.
in reply to eshep

@eshep @serenity @F00FC7C8 likes to infodump @rom If you're following a hashtag you'll see posts from people nobody on your instance is following and those won't come in as they're posted, but will be fetched as a side-effect of actions by people that are being followed.
in reply to Шуро

@Александр

@serenity @Fediverse @rom @eshep @F00FC7C8 likes to infodump

You're welcome! Great to hear that :) I wonder why Cron job is the recommended method by Friendica. When I saw that in the installation guide I was like "naah I'll stick with the "non-recommended" method" 😃

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