With each new #Facebook scandal like the recent WhatsApp-related one, the #Fediverse welcomes a wave of new users and admins. #Friendica gets its tiny share of the newly converted to decentralized social media. Some stick, most don't, but there's always this one guy (it's always a man) whose first few messages on GitHub are to angrily complain that Friendica isn't user-friendly enough and that it is spelling doom for a project they didn't know the day before and for the #Fediverse as a whole.

This has been going on ever since I joined the project in 2016, and we're still here. 🤷‍♂️

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in reply to Hypolite Petovan

It was Facebook's nonsense that lead me to search for a more robust more censorship proof alternative and now running a Friendica node. It helps that I had all the necessary infrastructure already in place since I run an Internet hosting business. I tried diaspora and some others but didn't like the limited message size or comment sizes which restrict decent discussions. Topics that are complex can't be expressed in 4k bytes or shorter snippets and sound bites that just cheer one's side don't have a prayer at arriving at a real solution. Friendica supports these longer conversations which is what I like about it though I'm not 100% happy with the user interface.
in reply to Nanook

@Michael Vogel @utzer [Friendica] @Hypolite Petovan I did fix the free memory calculation error in friendica where it was using Linux's free rather than available, the former basically useless since any memory not used for something else ends up being disk cache so free always approaches zero. I could be more useful if I knew PHP significantly or knew how to use github better. But I'm not dead yet so maybe some day.
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friendica - Link to source

Hypolite Petovan

My initial gripe wasn't that Friendica would somehow be user-friendly, it most definitely could use some improvement in that department, and I'm sorry about that. But you made it, congratulations! And unless you're the person I'm thinking about, you didn't complain to us all the way through!
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friendica - Link to source

Hypolite Petovan

To be frank, I'd rather not. Over the years we've received similar reports and complaints about the same areas of Friendica, install (un)ease, confusing and/or dated interface, poor onboarding, sporadic and heterogenous documentation.

So we absolutely know the pain points of using Friendica, including because we use it ourselves, but these are domains that aren't very gratifying to work on for most of us core developers, so we don't spend much of our limited volunteering time on them and they simply don't improve as a result.

So we don't need someone else to point out what is painfully obvious for us. Of course we always welcome respectful feedback, but at this point we don't necessarily need additional feedback about Friendica's user-friendliness or lack thereof.

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friendica (DFRN) - Link to source

Nanook

@chillzard✔️ @Hypolite Petovan I hope I made mine clear. Biggest issue I've had with people I've introduced to it is they have a difficult time finding posts initially and the community verses home is confusing. And then local verses network is going to be confusing to people not familiar with a federated network. Content discovery I understand because I've used other sites where you have to go and find people you are interested in but many people are used to having it pushed to them ala Farcebook. Obviously doing so introduces undesirable biases into the equation which is why I did not suggest it.
in reply to Nanook

@Robert Dinse important as a admin is to use Relays and add some tags for the server to follow.

For the users it is important to
1. Write a newhere (make that a tag too!!) post with as many words as tags as possible. Do not make it look spammy, but include up to 10 tags of things you're interested in.
2. Follow all those tags after you sent the post, ie. click on them and add them by the plus in the right upper corner. There might nothing be shown there, but in the next days it will change. As the server (at least when properly configured) will receive posts tagged with these tags.
3. Follow anyone that seems remotely interesting. I they turn out to be not interesting then unfollow again.

I think these are very important for starters.

in reply to Hypolite Petovan

I think I first tried it out in 2019, it was still having issues. I just waited and then tried maybe half a year later in intervals until it reached a point that it got to my level of standards and then made tutorials for it so that others could understand what I didn't before. I feel like last year was when it reached its real stride. It may be counterintuitive to the casual user, but it's like the difference between adobe photoshop editor and to other social media platform's Microsoft paint because its filling all the niches of social media. It is all the social media platforms ever created combined into one. I love that I can make recommendations and have them taken seriously even though it may take a while because the developers are working for free or from donations. I'm always looking forward to seeing what new feature comes out now in the quarterly upgrades.
in reply to Hypolite Petovan

I think part of it is they are used to dealing with giant faceless corporations that will never actually listen any way. I know that once i got very detailed feedback and extra questions on github it boosted my feeling of community engagement. There aren't elites who cntrol our online experiences at a whim or for more ad revenue, they genuinely care about making it a good experience and act like they don't know everything and see a new good idea when they hear one but also know if its doable or not at this stage. Not also being condescending is one of the developers biggest strong points. Also app development especially apple apps probably requires a different skill set than building this site
in reply to Hypolite Petovan

@Hypolite Petovan @Rabuzarus @Michael Vogel @utzer @Claes Wallin 🇸🇪🇭🇰 Well now that I am running one of each I feel better qualified to speak to both. Hubzilla has a dark mode that in my view hands down beats ANY of the themes available for Friendica in terms of aesthetics. In terms of difficulty of use, there is more "stuff" in hubzilla so initially it is more difficult to find your way around. Installation wise hubzilla is hands down FAR easier to install, it's a pure PHP app, no perl, no ruby, no java, just PHP which means no necessity of a reverse proxy, etc. In terms of efficiency, friendica is a major win, hubzilla makes a lot of sequential accesses to database instead of selects, I had to do some tuning of mariadb to get it to handle the load which peaked at over 400 transactions per second. Never seen anything like that with friendica. Hubzilla's scraping is even worse than Friendicas, basically non-existent. Hubzilla's search feature for other users seems to work better. Hubzilla's channels is a feature Friendica could really use. So all in all they are different, they both have their place.