Friendica is a great fediverse alternative to Facebook

Honestly not sure if the concept of Facebook was so great to begin with actually....

The general concept of Facebook I think is fine

I don't have any problem with the idea of a website where you can go to share things with your friends, family, coworkers, etc.

For me, the biggest problem is that there's way too many opportunities for you to interact with people you don't have any real connection to.

Unless you have mutual friends, you shouldn't see anything someone else is posting, sharing, liking, or commenting on. The only thing you should see from them is a name, profile picture, and a short bio when you search for them.

There shouldn't be public pages for businesses, celebrities, etc. Everything you see on Facebook should be there because someone you actually know thought that it should be shared with their friends.

And if, for some reason there must be public pages, then you should only see what your friends are commenting on those pages, not complete strangers.

There shouldn't be public groups that just anyone can join. Groups should be limited to people you're actually connected to in some way. Not that you necessarily need to be friends directly, but you should be able to trace a clear line of mutual friends connecting any two people in the group together. There shouldn't be a public "we love bowling" (for example) group that anyone can join, but if you started a bowling league and wanted to start a group for it, you might start with Jeff, Walter, and Donny who all know each other, then Jeff adds his friend Smoky who also wants to join, and then Smoky adds his friend Liam who adds his friend Jesús, etc. Jeff may not be directly friends with Jesús, but they're connected by actual people so they can be in the same group. And Jesús and Jeff wouldn't get to see anything each other do outside of that group because they're not friends and don't even have any immediate mutual friends. Their entire relationship is through the bowling league.

Want to talk to, follow, and share things with strangers? Go join a forum, get on Lemmy/reddit, use Twitter, start a blog, publish a book, send an op ed into the local newspaper, etc. That's what those platforms are for. Facebook is for talking to people you know.

Friendica and other Facebook like platforms don't really solve those problems, but since they're smaller and less businesses and such are on them it kind of feels like they do.

That's my 2¢ on the matter anyway.
Really? Especially after lockdown, the idea to specifically communicate in non-realtime with friends/family seems quite useful to me.
A platform to communicate specifically with IRL friends?

Have they figured out how to make access-controlled posts (i.e. friends-only, or for specific subgroups) work with ActivityPub federation, or are all your posts public and visible to anyone, as on Mastodon? If people are going to start using this platform, there will need to be an option for making posts visible only to friends (and “followers only” is not a viable alternative).

I'm not sure how functional it is but this is what I get when creating a post.

if you're capable and have a server, i recommend spinning up pixelfed and friendica instances for your parents and families. they're probably the simplest fediverse apps to install too.

it's one thing for you to move, it's another thing to be able to get your parents and family to move over.

This is something that I hope fediverse developers and OSS developers start focusing on: making installation and self-hosting much simpler. Currently trying to set up self-hosted anything is a gigantic pain in the ass if you’re not already an experienced sysadmin.
- Yunohost is a couple of clicks and done. The only problem is you need subdomains to put the apps on so you need to know a little about DNS.
- Docker containers are the solution and we already have it.
- i wonder if a geocities or ezboard style could work
how would you recommend pitching it? I know all the sweet unix/linux things, and freedom and such, but how would you pitch it in a way that your parents would care about?
- well most of the time - at least for me - they're just there for the rest of the family so if you can get the rest of the family on there and then maybe let them invite their friends, that's all they really need

The software might be, but what makes a social network is the network effect, and the biggest public english friendica server has a few hundred users.

I had an account in like 2016, but it got deleted after a few months due to inactivity..

That small of a userbase and they still nuke accounts for being inactive?
- I don't remember what server it was, maybe they had a good reason. I guess around 2016 there was a short boom that resulted in a lot of inactive accounts after a few months..
- They don't have a monetary incentive to bloat their figures.
Friendica is part of the fediverse and can talk to mastodon, lemmy etc. Plenty of users out there
- Does it much in practice though? I'm on mastodon and Lemmy a lot, and don't see any friendica accounts out and about...
Friendica is federating with Mastodon etc. and also Lemmy etc.
- Friendica is starting to seem like a fantastic option to serve as a hub account to the fediverse! There's a reason people liked Facebook at one point, and I think they're on the right track to advancing the idea with less corrupting influences
- Seems to with work with Mbin as well
The thing about Federation is that one server of a few hundred users can federate with all the other servers of a few hundred units and also other Federated services.

The next thing you know, you have a social network graph of millions of people, on thousands of servers (and not one ad).
- I know. But that is one of the bigger servers, and there aren't that many at the moment. I think a facebook-style friend-based social network is going to struggle to boot-strap itself into a reasonable network density, at least in the foreseeable future. I don't know what it would take to get non-techy pleb users to leave Facebook en masse.
  
  Generals interest networks like Lemmy and mastodon have a much easier time getting started.

...users can also use Friendica as a publishing platform to post content to Google+, Google Buzz, WordPress, Tumblr, GNU-social, and Libertree.

Well, that's a hell of a pitch. I hope the codebase gets updated more frequently than the blurb.

I made an account there today but haven't really figured out how it works yet.

You will get the hang of it!
- Thanks! I'm sure I will, it'll probably just take some time. :)

Which allow users to connect with others via their own Friendica server,

Wouldn't it be helpful to state that you can also sign up at an existing instance? Or is that less encouraged for friendica? I suppose being so personal that would make sense.

Most software developers aren't interested in being website admins for every Tom, Dick, and Harry. They're building the software for other people to host websites, not to run a social networking site for you.

It's not like the phpBB devs are hosting random car enthusiast websites.
- Nobody said they are. However, "a great fediverse alternative to Facebook" does not mean, in the minds of most people who might read it: "you could host a website that would serve as a great fediverse alternative to Facebook."
- Right, but here for example, I'm not hosting anything myself. I'm participating courtesy of a generous guy with spare server resources.