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Fediverse @lemmy.world
korendian @lemmy.world

Friendica's marketing is terrible.

It seems like it should be sort of a priority for the fediverse to create a high quality alternative to Facebook, which is one of the largest platforms out there, and probably what a lot of people think of when they think of "social media", and yet, the marketing and overall adoption of Friendica is simply abysmal, to put it bluntly.

Issue 1: The super bland and basic on-boarding.

When you visit the main website for friendica, you are greeted with "friendica: a decentralized social media network" followed by a "try it" button. Then when you scroll down, there is basic black text on a white background, explaining things like decentralization, privacy, and interoperability. Do you think that this sort of intro is really going to draw people in? It gives off the vibe of "it is your birthday", a la dwight from the office.

If you click on the "try it" button, you get scrolled to a part of the site that says "Try Friendica" with two sentences that basically say "this website is really complex overall, but don't worry, you can click another button below to browse a list of servers (yes, servers, we are not explaining what that means, just click the button)". The actual server list has a single filter option, language, and if you filter by english, the top server right now is a furry server. If any normie has somehow managed to get this far, they are sure to nope the fuck out at this point.

Assuming you do manage to get past this point, the actual sign up form has way too much information for the average person. The first field is "openID". I'm sure that's useful for those who use it, but why is it the first field? There is also a check box to be added to the public directory, which is checked no by default. What does this mean? It is certainly not explained here. You're not asking for a password? Why not? Oh, because you are making a random password for me I have to copy and paste and then save or change. That's not inconvenient at all. Yet another step of friction for me.

Compare this on-boarding process to other sites on the fediverse. Mastodon has a catchy and succinct explainer on why their site is worth joining followed by a "join mastodon.social" button, or a "pick another server" button. If you go to the servers button, you get several different filtering options, region, interest, sign up process, legal structure, and very notably, a disclaimer that all of these servers have signed a safety agreement. Upon signing up, you first agree to some terms of service, which is very reassuring for those looking for a safe and welcoming platform, followed by entering username, e-mail, password and date of birth. All very straight forward. Lemmy is similarly streamlined and polished, and you don't even need an e-mail to sign up for some servers. Super easy and convenient.

Issue 2: Terrible mascot.

Mastodon has their mastodon carrying a knapsack. Lemmy has the lemming face. Pixelfed has a cute red panda. Friendica has.....some kind of demented looking rabbit with bugged out eyes? Seriously, what the hell is this?

Issue 3: Super basic blog style website.

As alluded to in issue 1, the website is super basic, with almost no polish to it. It looks like someone made it on wordpress. The home page does have some clip art type images and background stuff thrown in here and there, but outside of that, it looks very unprofessional. Again, comparing to sites like Mastodon and Lemmy, which have much more polished and professional looking web design. The clearly put time into making sure new users get a good impression. Friendica puts almost no effort whatsoever.

So these three issues, just from an outsiders glance, are in my opinion some of the biggest things holding back what could potentially be one of the most used sites on the fediverse, at least on the marketing side of things. I do not know how the overall team behind the site is structured, but suffice to say, it needs work.

91 comments

  • It's an acquired taste. Now that I've been using it for months, I prefer it. I like that I have my Bluesky and Tumblr posts completely integrated into my timeline. I can reply to Bluesky posts. When I post something, it automatically gets posted to Bluesky, and Tumblr, if I like. I never go onto Bluesky any longer. Likes and replies from Bluesky are right in with my Mastodon posts and RSS feed posts too. Yes, RSS integrates in as well (obviously you can't reply to them though).

    On Mastodon, if someone posts something interesting and I want to see replies and discussions, I can't, unless I remember to go back to the post and look. In Friendica I can click that I want to follow the thread, and it will notify me of the updates, and take me right to the new comment when I click it, it takes me directly to the notification. I love this! If I interact with a post (like it), same thing. It will track it for me. And it does a better job of pulling in replies and responses from all over.

    Yeah. Not all good.

    I run one of the Friendica servers and it's a problem child. The database grows rapidly and struggles. The database queries urgently need work. Some are super slow. It stalls a lot. The UI is confusing. The developers are not all that active any longer, but still active. The UI is, well, dated.

    More info about it here: https://news.elenarossini.com/the-future-of-social-is-here-a-show-and-tell-part-3-friendica/

  • I tried to love it. It's one of the most feature rich fediverse platforms out there. It has groups built in out of the box, it talks to Diaspora as well as Activitypub... But it's just... not nice to use.

  • Don't want to shout too much about this yet as it's still super early but I am actually working on a new fediverse app that I plan should be covering the same sort of use cases as Lemmy, Mastodon and Friendica, all in one application. With a big focus on user friendliness, easy onboarding and such.

    It's still super early but drop me a private message if you're interested in helping or just hearing more.

    • If you're not creating it to push propaganda I'd be willing to donate to a project like that.

      • Where do you place "be kind to each other" on the propaganda scale?

      • Propaganda is definitely not on the list of planned features, haha :)

        Appreciate the sentiment, I hope it will one day be worthy of donations :)

    • How do we keep track of the project and support it?

      • It's very early. I have a prototype backend server and I'm currently starting work on the frontend. If you have any inputs on features, UX, UI, or anything else that you maybe are missing from existing fediverse apps, I'd love to hear from you, as some preliminary feedback. But again, it's early so there is not much to track yet. But thank you for the interest :)

    • Hi, I'd be interested in learning more about your project to create a new Fediverse software.

      I want to be honest: I don't have much faith in the success of your project and I'll explain why.

      1. very successful projects like Mastodon show great difficulty in improving, because they were born to be too simple, set up to do minimal microblogging, and then grew together with their user base;
      2. very long-lived projects like Friendica, have had even more difficulty in improving because they were born to be very complex,
      3. projects that have had a great marketing push like Pixelfed, continue to be (in my opinion) very modest;
      4. forumverse (or threadverse) projects like Lemmy have received the main damage precisely from the incompatibility wanted by Mastodon against them;
      5. new very interesting projects like Bonfire (the only software together with Friendica and Hubzilla to manage the "circles") are being developed with difficulty and are made up of many modules and above all do not have a decent app.
      6. a brilliant developer like the one who created Kbin has created a wonderful software, but due to the enormous success it had all the Kbin instances went haywire, he was unable to keep up with the support requests and disappeared forever from circulation after a month of burnout
      7. even the best software in the Fediverse is useless if there is no smartphone app and not all the software in the Fediverse can be managed with an app

      Finally, the impression I had is that even among the most famous developers of the Fediverse there is a bit of ignorance about Activitypub, about other platforms and about how other developers have solved the same problems; also it seems that the "Masters of the Fediverse" are always in a bad mood and have less and less desire to learn new things (a praiseworthy exception is Matthias Pfefferle).

      Creating a federated software is therefore not a very simple thing neither technically nor psychologically, but if you feel capable of doing it, perhaps it could be advisable to test yourself a bit:

      • developing some web utilities, some plugins or less ambitious projects
      • actively contributing to other existing projects (Friendica? Bonfire?)
      • getting familiar with both the Mastodon API (which is an industry standard) and with the development and definition of APIs in general: when someone wants to write an app for your software, they will look at your code and in two minutes they will decide if it is worth doing!

      Of course I didn't tell you these things to depress you, but only to point out some things that are often not foreseen: in reality I hope that your idea can become a fantastic project!

      Good luck!

      • Hi, thanks a lot for your detailed message!

        I totally understand the lack of faith - I mean I've shown nothing to earn any faith so that's completely fair. I also share your frustration with existing apps that have shown to not improve or be good enough. That's part of the reason why I wanted to try my hand at it myself. I feel that the status quo is not good enough and I believe in the mantra that "if someone else is doing something that you think you can do better, you should do it".

        forumverse (or threadverse) projects like Lemmy have received the main damage precisely from the incompatibility wanted by Mastodon against them;

        Not sure what you mean with "damage" here, but my plan is to support all kinds of ActivityPub content, both the microblog stuff that Mastodon is known for, the forum stuff that Lemmy does and anything else from other apps. I don't want my app to feel limited like Mastodon or Lemmy. Mastodon is very microblog-focused, Lemmy is very forum-focused. I want something that can do both and more. In some ways, this makes it harder, in other ways it makes it simpler. For instance, Lemmy makes a difference between "posts" and "comments"; they are not the same thing in the database. But in my app, comments are just another post, much like how posts work in Mastodon.

        new very interesting projects like Bonfire (the only software together with Friendica and Hubzilla to manage the “circles”) are being developed with difficulty and are made up of many modules and above all do not have a decent app.

        I've heard of these projects, but haven't studied them in detail. I find bonfire especially confusing. I can't seem to grok what it is - is it a server, or a framework for a server, or an app? For instance there's this app but the code link goes nowhere. There's also this repo with commits that look super weird. Honestly just confused about it. Anyway.

        I agree that having good mobile support (including an app with great UX) is super important.

        Finally, the impression I had is that even among the most famous developers of the Fediverse there is a bit of ignorance about Activitypub, about other platforms and about how other developers have solved the same problems; also it seems that the “Masters of the Fediverse” are always in a bad mood and have less and less desire to learn new things (a praiseworthy exception is Matthias Pfefferle).

        I've tried to learn a lot about ActivityPub and I understand it fairly well at this point I would say. I've participated a bit at https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/ where ActivityPub is discussed at length. I'm not sure what "Masters of the Fediverse" refers to but I definitely am a curious soul and I think continuous learning is super important :)

        Creating a federated software is therefore not a very simple thing neither technically nor psychologically, but if you feel capable of doing it, perhaps it could be advisable to test yourself a bit:

        • developing some web utilities, some plugins or less ambitious projects
        • actively contributing to other existing projects (Friendica? Bonfire?)
        • getting familiar with both the Mastodon API (which is an industry standard) and with the development and definition of APIs in general: when someone wants to write an app for your software, they will look at your code and in two minutes they will decide if it is worth doing!

        I appreciate your concern, but I am a professional software engineer so I'm not so worried about the scale of the project. Rest assured, I have worked on very large projects professionally and built plenty of things in side projects, most of them related to the web. I also administrate Feddit.dk so I have experience with hosting a Lemmy instance and all the complexity that brings.

        I particularly enjoy Rust, and I did actually look into contributing to Lemmy (since that uses Rust in the backend) at first before I started my own project. Unfortunately, Lemmy's code is... not where I would like it to be (both of Lemmy's main devs learnt Rust while working on Lemmy, and it unfortunately shows in the code quality), and the direction of Lemmy is not the direction I want to take my project, as stated above. I want something more general than a Reddit clone, though it will be inspired by Reddit/Lemmy in some ways (I plan to use up/down votes to sort content, for instance).

        I have no interest in contributing to Friendica, as the direction seems bad, as noted in the post above. Besides, it's PHP and I really don't want to touch that. Hubzilla is also PHP and seems much to technical for general users, so once again not viable. Bonfire seems to be Elixir which I don't know either, but again I am super confused about what Bonfire even is. All these reasons and other reasons are why I wanted to do my own project.

        I don't agree with you that the Mastodon API is an "industry standard" - it may be widely used, but Mastodon is continually forcing its own ideas of the Fediverse on the rest of the ecosystem, which I don't like and is something that is often bemoaned on https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/. But rest assured that I am very familiar and comfortable with APIs (again, professional software engineer 🙂). I care about documentation a lot and from the start, my prototype backend has exposed its API via an OpenAPI specification so that clients can be easily generated. I'm actually about to use this OpenAPI spec to generate a client myself as I start work on the frontend 🙂.

        Again, thanks a lot for your thoughts and attention! If you have any concrete feedback on the UI and/or UX of Lemmy, Mastodon, Friendica or other apps, I'd love to hear it, as I'm starting work on the UI for my own frontend these days. For instance, any favourite UI of a fediverse app, any preferred features or any common mistakes or pitfalls that should be avoided, if you have any thoughts along that direction.

91 comments