caos

The Channels in Friendica are similar to the “antennas” / “newspickers” in Misskey / Sharkey. Both are very good ways to receive content sorted by self-defined topics.

If you are looking for a way to *send *to different topics, Friendica’s (connected) “accounts” would be suitable for this, But Hubzilla offers more options for this

“Friendica - the BlueSky integration…”

Friendica offers a connector for Tumblr as well as for Bluesky. Ad hoc I can only find a German-language manual for it: https://friendica-hilfe.gitbook.io/friendica-hilfe/basics/bluesky-tumblr-und-weitere-social-media-dienste

Hubzilla certainly has the most options for privacy. But it is ‘not perfect’. More detailed here (in German):

"Full disclosure: The encryption that hubzilla uses by default is not absolutely watertight. There are known methods to circumvent it. However, this is very time-consuming and has to be done individually for each channel. And to be clear: Other services store your messages in plain text, so we see this approach as a significant improvement for your privacy. Furthermore, you are always free to use additional encryption and password protection if you wish. To explain this in more detail:

• each channel has its own key pair
• every non-public post is automatically encrypted
• optional password protection for content via crypto javascript, browser-to-browser encryption (must be enabled in settings) Full disclosure: A malicious hub administrator could inject malicious javascript code (e.g. keylogging capabilities) into the code. Encrypt our data with GPG, become a hub administrator yourself, or use other means of communication if that bothers you.

So what is the scope of security? To put it bluntly, it may be great, but it’s not perfect."

With Friendica you have a picture gallery and can set for each picture whether it should be public or private; same with calendars. However, I can’t say how private it will be from a technical point. You can also define contact circles.

Here on the Features list it says “Privacy with military encryption” but I don’t know what that refers to exactly.

The direct messages are definitely more private than with Mastodon (they don’t work with Mastodon). Sharkey / Misskey also have some.

Here is a good video introduction to Friendica : https://peertube.stream/w/p/1e4ebc30-d582-4067-97d8-3de59bdaf330?playlistPosition=1

“Are there English miskey instances? I know it’s primarily big in japan”

I have no experience with Misskey itself. You can filter by language on the project page: https://misskey-hub.net/en/servers/

For Sharkey et al. there is a list of instances where registration is possible: https://contentnation.net/en/favstarmafia/sharkey

This overview shows which functions differ: https://pancakes.gay/misskey-comparison/

That’s true, the -keys are certainly closer to Twitter than to Lemmy / Reddit.

But even Mastodon can follow hashtags, the interesting thing about the -keys are imho the Antennas / Newspicker, with which you can set up individual timelines with your own search word combination. This makes it less user-centred and more related to topics / content. And at least you can display ‘load conversations to replies’ in the timeline (in Sharkey). This means that the post snippets are not displayed without context, as is the case with Mastodon, but a part of the thread is shown in the timeline.

As a result, threads from Lemmy are also displayed somewhat better in Sharkey than in Mastodon, where all replies arrive separately.

Misskey and its forks are a bit in between and already very different from Mastodon. And I don’t think they bear any resemblance to Twitter (which I don’t know from experience). There are 3000+ characters and the thread display is also a bit better there and not quite as jumbled as on Mastodon. In my opinion, the thread view is best in Friendica (apart from Lemmy).

If I understand correctly, all three are possible, but I don’t use it myself and only know these instructions in German. Here are the most important paragraphs (automatically) translated:

"Friendica allows you to make various settings. You therefore have the choice of whether and how you want to use the connection to Bluesky.

Even if the connection to Bluesky has been established and your contacts have been imported, this does not mean that all your Fediverse posts are automatically visible on Bluesky.

Friendica gives you the freedom to decide how deeply you want to integrate with Bluesky.

[ 1 ] ‘Publish to Bluesky by default’ - if this option is activated, every post will also be visible on Bluesky

[ 2 ] ‘Import the remote timeline’ - if this option is activated, all posts from the accounts you follow will be imported.

[ 3 ] ‘Complete the threads’ - if this option is activated, all comments on your posts and those of your contacts will be completed with additional comments.

Your connection to Bluesky is now established. Your timeline will now be filled with posts from the Fediverse and Bluesky.

You can now interact with your Bluesky contacts. For example, by entering a comment without opening the Bluesky app or browser window."

Since the text is from 2020, some information is no longer up to date: The connections to Twitter and Facebook are closed, instead there are now connectors to Tumblr and Bluesky

I’m not a big fan of Mastodon either (started with it, but now prefer Friendica and Lemmy), for me personally it’s not a good fit. But hashtags on Mastodon are at least a way to follow not just individual users but also topics (and this only works if they are hashtagged). With Friendica, Sharkey and others, you can define your own individual channels / antennas for certain topics, so hashtags and individual accounts are not so important. And for Lemmy, they’re not important at all. But as a Lemmy user, I can still put up with it when I see a hashtag (that gives others an advantage). What’s so bad about seeing it?

Every Fediverse content looks a little different, depending on which access software or app you use to view it. It seems that there are also Lemmy apps that display hashtags a little too exaggerated, while in others and in the web-gui it is ok. (in an earlier version of the guide it also said that you shouldn’t use hashtags/tags esp. in the headline because it didn’t work properly back then).

But maybe I should include a note in the instructions that hashtags should be used sparingly or placed at the end?

From here (webapp) it looks quite ok. You seem to be using an app that exaggerates hashtags a bit too much. (which app is it?)

It has successfully reached Lemmy ! 🚀

If you want to host your own instance, there are also managed hosting offers for Friendica, e.g. by Weingärtner-IT (from 4€/month) or Spacehost (20€).

To get to know Friendica, however, I would recommend simply creating an account and testing it out, first.

github

I would suggest Codeberg: “Codeberg is a collaboration platform providing Git hosting and services for free and open source software, content and projects”