@piratepost @fediverse @dieguitux8623 thank you do much for your hard work on this app, it's beautiful, well thought out and was so needed for friendica π
this post was submitted on 24 Nov 2024
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@lps extending the acknowledgement to @macfranc who talked to me about the need of an app for Friendica and helped me determining the roadmap, plus a big thank you to all beta testers: this is a very young project and it wouldn't be what it is without the help of all early adopters. ππ»ππ»ππ»
Pardon my ignorance, please but what is friendica? I've not heard of it before.
Facebook alternative from 2010. Pre-dates diaspora* by a few months.
Remember diaspora*? In summer 2010, four young fellows asked for $12,000 of crowdfunding so they could spend the summer developing a free, open-source, decentralised Facebook alternative. Mind you, summer 2010 was when Cambridge Analytica was still a hot topic. So they got $320,000, and the mainstream media wrote about a "Facebook killer" in development.
They started in May, 2010. It was in late autumn when they delivered a first, very early alpha release that was very incomplete and only ran on Mac servers. It took years until even a first beta release, not to mention replacing the whole dev team.
Friendica (originally Mistpark) was developed by one man. In four months, from March to July, 2010. With zero budget. And Mistpark, as it was when it was first released in July, 2010, could have easily mopped the floor with today's diaspora*, feature-wise, without even breaking a sweat.
Friendica does not try to be a Facebook clone. It tries to be "like Facebook, but way better". With lots of unnecessary cruft not taken over, but with all-new features integrated. For example, Friendica can be used as a full-blown blog with all text formatting shebang you could possibly imagine a blog to have, all the way to an unlimited number of images that can be embedded within the text, like, with text above the image and more text below the image.
By the way, Friendica comes with a built-in file storage complete with a file manager where you can upload images or whatever. Unlike on Mastodon and Lemmy, your images don't sink into some data nirvana.
Unlike all the microblogging stuff in the Fediverse, Friendica does not have any arbitrary character limit.
Remember Google+? It was a full-on diaspora* rip-off. Everyone things Google+ had invented circles. Google+ had actually stolen diaspora*'s aspects. But Friendica had them first, even before diaspora*, and calls them lists.
Also, Friendica has been supporting moderated discussion groups at various levels of privacy from the get-go.
But Friendica's biggest killer feature is and has always been that it can connect to a whole lot of stuff. It can connect to the entire ActivityPub-using Fediverse, it can connect to diaspora*, it can connect to anything that uses OStatus, it can cross-post to WordPress and compatible blogs, it can subscribe to RSS and Atom feeds while generating its own Atom feeds, it can "federate" via e-mail, its built-in chat is XMPP-compatible. You can also integrate a Bluesky account, you can integrate a Tumblr account, you can integrate an π account (but the node admin still has to shell out a couple million dollars for a full API key to be able to make full use of it), and for a few months around 2012, you could even integrate a Facebook account into Friendica until Facebook made extracting content to third parties illegal.
The idea was that your friends are all over the place, you're on Friendica, and you can stay in touch with all your friends without having to use all the stuff that your friends use. You can stay in touch with them on Friendica even though they're all over the place.
Sorta like Facebook, but federated with activitypub, so it can interact with mastodon and Lemmy a bit.
This blog post does a better job of explaining it.
@ProdigalFrog @harrys_balzac
Friendica, together with Diaspora, is a founding father/mother of today's Fediverse. 14 years ago it was still called βone Networkβ or βThe Federationβ.
It supports various protocols and can therefore connect different networks. You can integrate any other services via an add-on system. Since Lemmy and Friendica support groups, we can natively join the threads and play along with them as if we were on Lemmy ourselves
@feb @ProdigalFrog @harrys_balzac I love #friendica, it connects to all the protocols.. Just seems the level of polish/design/marketing of #mastodon stole the show...let that be a lesson to devs everywhere, design matters ;)
BTW not sure how many people know #raccoon the android app on #fdroid, it's an amazing friendica app!
@lps
Technically, it's incredible. For the front end, you need people from the community who are able to translate the complexity into a simple structure.
@ProdigalFrog @harrys_balzac I totally agree with this, I have a feeling more people coming from #facebook would greatly prefer #friendica...marketing is everything. That and a polished mobile app ... And cross platform:)
@lps In my opinion, from the fediverse point of view, the really interesting thing about Raccoon is that, since it is compatible with mastodon, it manages to give even Mastodon users the pleasure of using Activitypub groups, whether they are Lemmy communities, Magazines Mbin, Friendica groups or gup.pe.
Mastodon's design in fact penalizes users of groups, but this app solves the problem for Mastodon users too
Ahhh. I might take a closer look at it then. Sounds like it could be fun.
Friendica is very, very, very good. It's just that most people aren't looking for something that looks like pre-IPO Facebook for some reason.
Personally, I think they should be, but nobody ever listens to me.
Awe man I thought this might be a public service where they provide emotional support racoons.....
Unpopular opinion: Federated or not, life is better without social media in your pocket.
I doubt that's unpopular here tbh.
It's why I turn off notifications completely
Airplane mode here! Blocks all tracking and saves battery too.
I don't know if it's from the same developer, but I still have the Racoon for Lemmy app. It was sad to see them give up, I hope someone archived jthe community and the APKs. It was a good Lemmy app.
It got revived also! They're back on F-droid as well, not sure about it being the same developer as this though since I don't use friendica
edit: here's the new GitHub link: https://github.com/LiveFastEatTrashRaccoon/RaccoonForLemmy