https://www.noemamag.com/the-last-days-of-social-media/
Seems like it maybe suffers from the "fiefdom" / portability issue that other platforms struggle with, but I haven't looked closely.
This sucks and there's no way to push back on that. First, if you do it too much, you're just a "reply guy" - you become a part of the same suckiness of social media that you're trying to push back against. Second, the near-universal reaction you get is "maybe these specific immigrants were not eating pets, but you gotta agree with my broader concern about immigration". This just an example, the reaction has its equivalent for all sides of the political spectrum. We just like to read stuff that aligns with our political identity and beliefs. The pursuit of truth is a distant second.
I think that for social networks or forums to be at least somewhat healthy, they need to be small, specifically to limit the interactions you have with complete strangers and content that doesn't interest you at all. If you open up the ecosystem too much, it devolves into some flavor of Facebook.
As for actually doing this... running a PDS and relay isn't that hard, and the red dwarf web client is online and can be configured to point to whatever appview you want. There's significantly less experience running your own appview, but there are options & folks are happy to help.
What does this even mean? I’ve scoured the website, their wiki, their faq, the past hn convo… too no avail!
A substitution cypher was considered “military grade” for millennia
Example: https://freecities.app
Video demos: https://vimeo.com/1141492621/23e8b84b8b
Disclaimer: I built it. Lovingly, over 15+ years.
Like, i’m thinking photo album sharing (twitter-like makes photos ephemeral, quickly disappearing on the timeline) and conversation (twitter threading has never been strong imo).
I no longer recommend ATProto, in part because the public by default was a terrible choice. People prefer privacy, not anyone in the world able to read all of their activity. Bolting permissioned buckets on after the fact is not the way, it needs to be core to the protocol design.
In this case, pumping around information so social networks appear to be one unified system is a good thing because you don't have to visit them all to check if there are new posts, etc. and you can avoid getting caught in an algorithm.
And as long as there is a docker container, i don’t really care what language it’s written in, tbh - tho that is sometimes useful as a signal of the code quality or other aspects
Decentralized architecture with no central authority or ownership.
Relationships can be made across any compatible system, creating a network of Internet scale made up of smaller sites.
Seamless wall-to-wall posts and remote comments, even across different network nodes.
Access lists for every item.
Private conversation groups — on these pages all communications are restricted to group members.
One-to-one private messaging on supported protocols.
Optionally "expire" old content after a certain period of time.
Download your personal data. It all belongs to you.
Built-in support for ActivityPub (e.g. Funkwhale, Hubzilla, Mastodon, Pleroma, Pixelfed), OStatus (e.g. StatusNet, GNU social, Quitter) and diaspora* protocols.
Support for email contacts and communications (two-way) via IMAP4rev1/ESMTP.
Import arbitrary websites and blogs into your social stream via RSS/Atom feeds.
Support for other services via plugins.
Keep in contact with people you care about.
Write your thoughts, edit them if you want. Comment, Like and Dislike posts from your contacts.
Share your holiday photos, but only with people you want.
Organize the next meeting of your reading group, or let everybody know about your cool party!
Like in real life, have a public profile and private aspects only for your closest friends. Or keep everything private!
Do you want to try Friendica but don't have the technical knowledge to install your server? You can create an account on one of the many servers out there which accept new users!
Have a look at the list of public servers
Friendica is free software and use free protocols.

Run your personal Friendica node on shared hosts.
Friendica runs on PHP with MySQL as a database. If you can run WordPress, you can run Friendica.

Extensible via third-party plugins and themes.
Add functionality, personalize the look and feel, connect to third-party services.
Be part of the network, host a Friendica server for you, your family and your friends!
| 27. January 2026
We are very happy to announce the availability of the new stable release of Friendica “Blutwurz” 2026.01. In addition to several improvements and new features, this release contains fixes for security problems that Hrizi Bilel has notified us about. Thanks for your report! It also contains the first results of a accessibility review by Casey […]
Tobias | 16. January 2026
We are excited to be part of the 2026 edition of the Social Web Devroom at FOSDEM with a short update on Friendica on Saturday @18:00 CET about what happened in 2025 with Friendica. Should you happen to be in Brussels at the weekend of the 31. Jan / 1. Feb and want to join […]
Tobias | 1. January 2025
38c3 with many Fediverse related meet-ups has just finished but we are already looking forward to meet at FOSDEM at the first weekend of February. Tobias from the Friendica devel team will give a talk about Friendica at FOSDEM 25 in the Social Web Devroom. Friendica – under the radar since 2010 is scheduled for […]
Tobias | 1. January 2025
We are very happy to announce the availability of the new stable release of Friendica “Interrupted Fern” 2024.12. In addition to several improvements and new features, this release contains the fix for the broken installation wizard. The highlights of Friendica 2024.12 are For details, please see the CHANGELOG file in the repository. What is Friendica […]
Tobias | 15. October 2024
The development cycle for the 2024.09 release enters the last stage before the stable release – today we have branched off the 2024.09 release candid branch. 2024.09-rc contains all the features of the stable release and is meant to test the new features, find some last rough edges and smooth out the path to the […]