I've been using Friendica for a few years, and after playing around with other software such as #Pleroma, #Misskey and #Lemmy, I've ended up returning to the old reliable in my personal server. I'm honestly surprised to see Friendica offering a more solid offering of capabilities than many other newer #Fediverse platforms, such as #Mastodon itself. However, it still seems to be missing a few important capabilities (some of them already implemented in other AP software, some of them being improvements to the already existing capabilities of Friendica) that I would like to see implemented eventually, to finally being able to move full-time to a single Fediverse software instead of spreading my server cycles between several web-apps. Feel free to add to this list, or to recommend workarounds for any of the issues I've listed below. Also, I plan to see how to learn enough PHP in order to send PRs for a few of these, but I want to check if there's any work in progress regarding any of these issues to avoid duplicate efforts.

Issues that already exist in the tracker, roughly sorted by priority:

• Import posts from Mastodon / Misskey exported backups: see issue 6004 in GitHub.
• Ability to vote in polls, not just have them read-only: see issue 11093 in GitHub.
• Ability to import #RSS feeds and not only ActivityPub accounts: see issue 13854 in GitHub.
• Post translation, using a backend such as #LibreTranslate: see issue 12948 in GitHub.
• Merge related notifications to prevent duplicates: see issue 9729 in GitHub.
• React with emoji, as in #Misskey and derivatives: see issue 6271 in GitHub.

Issues that are already managed with an add-on, but have issues:

• Proper support for Mastodon custom emojis: the "Mastodon Custom Emojis" add-on can handle them in post content, partially, and can't handle them in user names yet.
• Handling the "NSFW" tag in federated posts: the "NSFW" add-on can detect specific words on a post, but if the post does not include them (and yet uses the "mark as NSFW" option in Mastodon), the post will be shown regardless.

Implementing new views in order to work better as a replacement for other platforms:

• Feed reader view a la #FreshRSS / #Lemmy: collapse comments and content, optionally add buttons to go to the previous/next unread item, filter by read.
• Video player /gallery view a la #PeerTube / #Pixelfed: pin media to top and comments / voting buttons to bottom.
• Dashboard view a la Tweetdeck: allow multiple columns with different filters. This might require a rewrite of the logic for each page, as each filter is currently implemented on the interface as a PHP request bound to each page load. This might fall out of scope for the default Friendica interface, and might be better served with an external web-app.

Issues that don't seem to be tracked currently, but are mostly a "nice-to-have" and have a lower priority:

• Ability to mix "what's hot" sorting with circle filtering: useful for news for example.
• Export posts in Firefish-compatible format: not mandatory, but would be handy for data migration purposes. Alternatively, one could make Firefish itself compatible with Friendica-formatted backups.

!Friendica Support

If you run a federated social networking node/instance I'm really curious what kind of system resource usage you are seeing.

I run Friendica and I really love it, but it's also the single largest source maintenance on my VPS. The database is huge, the ext storage is huge. PHP requests also constantly trigger slow logs to the point I gave Friendica it's own fpm pool with a sixty second slow log trigger and two minute timeout. The problem is, however, that I don't know if this is normal for of all social instances (i.e. mastodon, pleroma, etc.).

That said, I've noticed Friendica getting faster with development over time and the Friendica devs are amazing! They are fast to give support help or answer some of my more ignorant questions with patience. This is huge to me and outweighs the resource issues for the most part.

Still, I'm just curious if every federated project is this resource heavy, and maybe it's just a requisite of implementing the ActivityPub and other protocols... or maybe I'm doing something wrong ha. I don't know, I just want to get a feel for this from other administrators!

System resource usage for Friendica on social.linuxlusers.com:
CPU: Negligible
RAM: Negligible
MySQL (mariadb): 14gb (after fresh optimize)
Storage dir: 9gb
Proxy dir: 4gb

If there's any info I should add let me know and I'll post it. I have only a couple of sim-regular users, but I've had a couple hundred of (apparently) fake accounts. I manually remove the obvious ones that post spam or have obvious marketing names, but the vast majority never seem to do anything on the site, so I utilize the feature to remove old accounts after a certain number of months inactive. I also have fairly conservative data-retention settings for the proxy and elsewhere in settings.

Please share your experiences if you can! 😀

#Friendica #Mastodon #Pleroma #Fediverse #Federated #federatedweb #Serveradmins #selfhosted