Things got so bad that Mastodon users are trying to guide Facebook users to Friendica now; CW: long post (over 3,700 characters), Fediverse meta, Fediverse beyond Mastodon meta, profanity
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Interesting things are going on in the Fediverse right now. And unexpected things.
See, I've always thought that when the shit hits the fan on Facebook, the Mastodon crowd would barge in and drag everyone to Mastodon, no questions asked, no explanation. And we would end up with another few million people for whom the Fediverse is only Mastodon.
I was also afraid of this happening because I know nobody who's on both Facebook and Friendica. In general, Friendica users have quit Facebook long ago, often after Facebook disrupted Friendica's Facebook connector.
Now the shit
does hit the fan. But apparently, even on Mastodon, many people are becoming aware that Mastodon is not a good drop-in replacement for Facebook. And that Friendica is much closer. I mean, one of the most important features on Facebook are groups, Mastodon doesn't even know what groups are, but on Friendica, they're an integral part.
It's almost a miracle:
Mastodon users are trying to guide Facebook users to
Friendica. This also means it's likely that the new Friendicans will know that the Fediverse extends beyond Friendica. I mean, they'll find out anyway because Friendica indicates which server application a post or a comment comes from.
We might be getting to the point where the biggest buzz in the Fediverse quits being self-hosted GoToSocial (and that
was the big buzz around New Year) and switches to the oldest surviving project in the Fediverse, not to mention something that's so very much not Twitter-style microblogging for a change.
The reason why Mastodon is so abuzz with Friendica talk is because those who try to guide Facebook users to Friendica often don't know much about Friendica themselves, and now they're shouting into the void for help, hoping that someone catches the hashtag.
I myself am not much of a Friendica expert. It's been a while since I've laid my hands on it. But: I'm connected to a lot of rank-and-file Friendica users. I think I can cover Friendica's entire core bubble in two steps or three at most.
I've succeeded in helping someone interested in Friendica by importing their post onto my stream and repeating it to my own contacts (thanks to Hubzilla introducing repeats). It definitely worked for @
Elena Rossini ⁂; I guess she would barely have been able to write
her newsletter post about Friendica (read this if you want to get folks off Facebook) if I hadn't stumbled upon her request for help, picked it up and forwarded it. In fact, I can be sure to always reach
someone competent in Friendica this way. (Same goes for Hubzilla and (streams), but that's another story, and I could step in and assist myself, too.)
That said, I'm not too keen on manually searching for Friendica help requests and relay them one by one. I could subscribe to mastodon.social's #
Friendica hashtag search feed instead. I could even try to make it a channel source and automatically relay what comes in this way to my connections. But that'd flood all that stuff onto the timelines of my hundreds of Mastodon connections as well. If it worked in the first place, because we've got a growing suspicion that this is broken currently.
So here's the shortcut: Maybe some of you Friendica users can subscribe to the #
Friendica hashtag search feed on Mastodon yourself and see what's going on there. Here is the URL:
https://mastodon.social/tags/friendica.rssI'd ask if Friendica has per-connection filters, but the hashtag is so busy with support requests in the wake of Facebook's extra enshittification that there's hardly any cruft in-between that needs to be filtered now.
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