Want to bring it back? bbc.com/future/article/2026040…
Tales of love and adventure from 1,000 years ago reveal a dazzling range of now-extinct English pronouns. They capture something unique about how people once thought about "two-ness".Sophie Hardach (BBC)
Welcome to our experiment. Here's an overview of Friendica, and why I thought it would work for us. Thank you!
Why Friendica? The short version: it's the best content hub I've found on the Fediverse — and it's everything corporate social media isn't.
No ads. No algorithm deciding what you see to maximize engagement. No data harvesting. Just you, your friends, and the content you actually chose to follow.
If you're tired of Instagram pushing products at you, of Twitter/X becoming a Nazi playground, or Facebook knowing more about you than your therapist — there's a better way. The Fediverse is an open, decentralized social web that nobody owns. Friendica is one of the best on-ramps into it.
A few things that won me over:
Interoperability. Friendica talks to ActivityPub (Mastodon, Pixelfed, etc.), Diaspora, Bluesky, and RSS feeds — all in one timeline. Follow newsletters and blogs right alongside your social contacts.
Reading experience. Posts and threaded replies are much easier to scan than Mastodon's stream. You can filter your feed by Circle, protocol, account type, or channel — not by what an algorithm thinks will keep you scrolling longest.
Rich post formatting. Titles, bold, italics, links, embedded images — actual formatting, not just a text box.
You're in control. The depth of settings lets you shape the experience to what you actually want. Novel concept, I know.
Yes, the UI looks like 2004. Yes, there's a learning curve. Worth it.
I'm self-hosting this own instance, which means the data lives on our server — not in some data center being mined for ad targeting. Come join me.
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