Edit 2024-10-01
Another person posted about a similar need, and I decided to create a matrix document to track it, in the hope that those of us looking for this specific use case could come up with the best solution. The idea here is that, while many OSS social media projects are capable of being used like a Fcbook wall, they don’t all necessarily provide an ideal user experience. Feature set is not equivalent to being designed for a specific use case, and the desired workflow should be the primary means of interacting with the service. The (for now) open document tracking this is here.
I’m a little surprised I can’t find any posts asking this question, and that there doesn’t seem to be a FAQ about it. Maybe “Facebook” covers too many use cases for one clean answer.
Up front, I think the answer for my case is going to be “Friendica,” but I’m interested in hearing if there are any other, better options. I’m sure Mastodon and Lemmy aren’t it, but there’s Pixelfed and a dozen other options with which I’m less familiar with.
This mostly centers around my 3-y/o niece and a geographically distributed family, and the desire for Facebook-like image sharing with a timeline feed, comments, likes (positive feedback), that sort of thing. Critical, in our case, is a good iOS experience for capturing and sharing short videos and pictures; a process where the parents have to take pictures, log into a web site, create a post, attach an image from the gallery is simply too fussy, especially for the non-technical and mostly overwhelmed parents. Less important is the extended family experience, although alerts would be nice. Privacy is critical; the parents are very concerned about limiting access to the media of their daughter that is shared, so the ability to restrict viewing to logged-in members of the family is important.
FUTO Circles was almost perfect. There was some initial confusion about the difference between circles and groups, but in the end the app experience was great and it accomplished all of the goals – until it didn’t. At some point, half of the already shared media disappeared from the feeds of all of the iOS family members (although the Android user could still see all of the posts). It was a thoroughly discouraging experience, and resulted in a complete lack of faith in the ecosystem. While I believe it might be possible to self-host, by the time we decided that everyone liked it and I was about to look into self-hosting our own family server (and remove the storage restrictions, which hadn’t yet been reached when it all fell apart), the iOS app bugs had cropped up and we abandoned the platform.
So there’s the requirements we’re looking for:
- The ability to create private, invite-only groups/communities
- A convenient mobile capture+share experience, which means an app
- Reactions (emojis) & comment threads
- Both iOS and Android support, in addition to whatever web interface is available for desktop use
and, given this community, obviously self-hostable.
I have never personally used Facebook, but my understanding is that it’s a little different in that communities are really more like individual blogs with some post-level feedback mechanisms; in this way, it’s more like Mastodon, where you follow individuals and can respond to their posts, albeit with a loosely-enforced character limit. And as opposed to Lemmy, which while moderated, doesn’t really have a main “owner” model. I can imagine setting up a Lemmy instance and creating a community per person, but I feel as if that’d be trying to wedge a square peg into a round hole.
Pixelfed might be the answer, but from my brief encounter with it, it feels more like a photo-oriented Mastodon, then a Facebook wall-style experience (it’s Facebook that has “walls”, right?).
So back to where I started: in my personal experience, it seems like Friendica might be the best fit, except that I don’t use an iPhone and don’t know if there are any decent Friendica apps that would satisfy the user experience we’re looking for; honestly, I haven’t particularly liked any of the Android apps, so I don’t hold out much hope for iOS.
Most of the options speak ActivityPub, so maybe I should just focus on finding the right AP-based mobile client? Although, so far the best experience (until it broke) has been Circles, which is based on Matrix.
It’s challenging to install and evaluate all of the options, especially when – in my case – to properly evaluate the software requires getting several people on each platform to try and see how they like it. I value the community’s experience and opinions.
isn’t Diaspora the most popular facebook alternative?
it also has 3 client apps on fDroid.
Misskey is a federated facebook alternative I heard about on mastodon recently. I’m not too familiar with it myself, but seems worth mentioning.
It has a “groups” feature that might avoid the “instance per person” lemmy workaround you were thinking about. According to this comparison misskey doesn’t have a like button, but a few of its forks do. Not sure about the upload experience; may depend on the app. I didn’t see any clients listed on their site but did a quick search for an iOS app, which exists, so i assume android, too.
Sorry I don’t have more info, but I hope that’s useful. Best of luck! I’ll be looking for a similar solution in the near future.
hubzilla! its privacy controls are unparalleled, can be used as a webapp on any platform, can be used for individual profiles, forums or for building our website. (https://hubzilla.org/page/info/discover))
I’ve been using it since a year and i am not disappointed. and its a fork of friendica so its has all its features and more.
Our family uses Humhub. It’s pretty similar to Facebook and installation/maintenance is pretty easy. The only issue would be that there’s no mobile app, however it works quite well on mobile browsers.
So what you want is a self hosted Flickr alternative, with extra privacy?
Please let me know your findings, I’m very interested even though I’m not in a position to contribute.
Friendica, Smithereen or Hubzilla
I’m not going to provide an answer here but more a point and perhaps complicate things a little more - With ActivityPub and other open Federated protocols - The Platform that you use and the client that you select can be different. I use a Mastodon account and Friendica account with FediLab as my mobile client. I guess you are looking for the feature set and then UI for both Desktop and Mobile.
Exactly. Mastodon-ish would be unsuitable as a server for a number of reasons: the loose, but still expected, character limitation; the lack of emoji responses; generally poor threading support; and the overall subscription feed-like model. OTOH, it’s based on a follow-the-user model, which is nice. I’m less familiar with Friendica, but AFAIK that’s also a follow-the-user model.
The issue with Federation is the general expectation that these are public places. You can lock them down, but that’s not what they’re designed for, and in my case, the risk of misconfiguration exposing a bunch of toddler pictures that the parents want to keep private is too high. I think of the server is federated-by-nature, then it must also be paranoid-by-default; I don’t trust share-public-by-default projects to not introduced something in an upgrade that exposes data. At least if the base presumption of the developers is that all information is private by default, the risk is limited to true accidents rather than false assumptions.
ActivityPub is enticing. It’s an exciting spec, and offers many client options. I’m worried only about those base assumptions.
Tl;dr but:
If you simply want the best UX, then you need to stay with the real Facebook etc.
They spend millions and millions and millions only for UX. Free software can never compete, period.
Have you used Facebook in the last 5 years?
The UX is godawful. More than half my feed is just random crap suggestions and ads.
I don’t think they have the ux advantage that their wealth suggests due to misaligned incentives. A good portion of their investment is getting users to see as many ads as they will tolerate. Try to modify any privacy settings, for example, and the ux is as garbage as amazon.
Fediverse and self hosted, open source alternatives are still relatively new. Folks have to expect some turbulence. As things grow and more bug reports and contributions can be made, the ux could be superior because they can give users what they want instead of maximizing monetization.
There are some excellent apps out there, and by and large they look and work better than commercial apps, IME. So I disagree with the assertion that I have to stay with commercial software.
What I was asking for, in my post, was not which apps have better UX than Facebook, but rather which of the very many OSS, federated (although, not necessary for my use case), self-hosted platforms fit the specific use, and ideally with a straightforward iOS mobile app. Doesn’t have to be pretty; just has to be able to quickly take and post photos to a private channel/community/wall.
Circles really is quite nice in all respects. I think they’re hindered by their choice of backend. I’ve been using Matrix for years, and key management has always been a hot mess. I wouldn’t be surprised if the issues we encountered were related to Matrix’s god-awful and buggy PK negotiation & management process.
Sorry didn’t read your post thoroughly.
Immich comes to mind.
Now read your own comment and reconsider if it actually made sense to post this
I think that proposing immich for every use case out there is not the correct answer.
As much as I like immich, this is not a good use case… iMHO.
To be fair, it is a very long-winded post. I think it’s not an uncommon use case, though, and so deserved a robust sketch of the desired solution; Farmville and chat are sideshows, and what the people left on Facebook are really there for are the Walls.
I remembered wrong that immich has comment feature.
My thoughts of train was
- you can selfhost it and make it private
- it has comment features (in feed and timeline)
- has mobile app and web interface
What came to my mind missed your bullet points. Happy hunting.
