"The server my [Friendica] instance is on is quite slow, often leaving me with a spinning wheel whenever I want to follow a new account. I’m not talking about a 2 second lag - more like 20 seconds at times, or even more."

@elena, 2024

https://blog.elenarossini.com/the-future-of-social-is-here-a-show-and-tell-part-3-friendica/

This has consistently been my experience with testing #Friendica. The feature set is amazing, but the performance of the aging GLAMP stack and the UX of the 'squeeze it wherever it fits' interface leave a lot to be desired. A shame.

The Future of Social is Here: a Show and Tell (part 3: Friendica)

A "show and tell" of my favorite features of Friendica, which has fast become my favorite place in the Fediverse

Elena Rossini
@strypey fwiw, i have recently returned to Masto from #Friendica [via Sharkey] for two specific reasons, this agonising galling lethargy / latency being one. it's such a great pity πŸ₯ΊοΈ@[email protected]

@MsDropbear42
> i have recently returned to Masto from Friendica [via Sharkey]

Did you mean returned to Misskey from Friendica?

> for two specific reasons, this agonising galling lethargy / latency being one

.. and the other?

My plan is to use Friendica primarily as a publishing platform, and for lengthy discussions where 500 char posts don't cut it. This account for everything else. We'll see how it goes.

@strypey nope

Did you mean returned to Misskey from Friendica?

after my latest cumulative #Friendica frustration, i went back to my #blahajzone account, which is a #Sharkey instance. then, two new frustrations there irritated me enough to return to my old standby, the Masto instance from which i'm posting this [& all other posts of the past several days].

and the other?

see my recent reference post; https://infosec.space/@MsDropbear42/116259818804308753

Droppie [infosec] 🐨:archlinux: :kde: :firefox_nightly: :thunderbird: :vegan:​ (@[email protected])

*aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand* so, here be me, back *yet again* almost\* at the beginning, the wheel not so much having turned full circle perhaps as derailed from the track & buggered orf into the scrub & mulga, startling the emus & irritating the yowies. πŸ™„πŸ€¦β€β™€οΈ \* Masto again, yes, but not the actual Masto web UI itself, given it's just too painful & a bit ugh, but instead, one of the #FOSS front-ends for it, being #Phanpy, notwithstanding its UI *still* has all the stuff that historically kept making me drop it. sadly, i'm here not so much out of explicit favour for it, but simply as an exhausted fallback position coz all these months & years have shown me that all the alternatives are on balance worse [& just for fun, each specialising in different aspects of "wrongness"]. - Phanpy [for Masto] still irritates me for its - weird Notifications UI, - stubborn refusal to include an emoji-picker for standard emojis, - disruptive habit of auto-reloading the timelines when scrolled to near the top rather than letting me manually choose, - inability to globally suppress boosts in Lists, - irritating need to open an overlay just to fav a post... - ***BUT*** it wins *major brownie points* with me for its - success in letting me see posts' video thumbnails & play them without having to jump outside P to the original source site PLUS - its apparent ability to let me create hashtag lists for more than merely five as limited by the actual Masto UI, AND it seems to do a fine job in fetching ample numbers of so-tagged posts from across fedi - #Statuzer [for Masto] had my heart for many months over recent years, at the times i would try Masto again, but today when i tried it again i could not see any way to create any dedicated timelines for nominated hashtags - CORRECTION: my silly error, it can indeed do this, yay - #Sharkey is aesthetically gorgeous, has a great array of settings options, a really clever flexible UI, brilliant hashtag timelines capability... but - it uses #MFM not #Markdown & i find this frustratingly limiting - yesterday i realised that if not all then a significant majority of others' posts, & all of mine, that include videos [eg, youtube & dailymotion], neither provide any graphical thumbnail nor allow said videos to be played directly in the UI [as i said, some do, which is great, but most don't]. Reference thread; https://blahaj.zone/notes/ak1ohqcgacpa0007 - additionally today i discovered a distressing perplexing problem, by chance; a strayan account that whilst not actually following does frequently appear in my hashtag-follows in all the other fedi SW, simply does not appear at all in my Sharkey timelines, & if i try manually searching for them [once alerted to their existence via the hours of comparison i have been doing today & am here summarising], the searches fail with cryptic errors. this has rocked my confidence in Sharkey in that by extrapolation & inference, how many other posts have been hidden from me when i've been using Sharkey? - #Friendica is a complex love-hate story; over the past 3.5 years i've tried many F instances, with my original sense of overwhelm gradually subsiding into understanding & enjoyment. i really do like it, but recently left my active instances yet again, coz: - compared to Masto-original, Statuzer, Phanpy, Sharkey, every Friendica instance's UI is lethargic in responding to various UI-navigation interactions, but - the worst problem has become terminal; i follow large nos of hashtags no matter which fedi SW & instance, but Friendica uniquely suffers the major problem that small instances simply do not adequately federate such that large swathes of my hashtags fetch few hits & many fetch none, whereas on larger instances though the hit-rate is acceptable two separate Admins, ie two different instances, told me that following large nos of tags causes them severe problems at their servers, which news shocked me & made me feel terrible for being an unwitting problem to them. Nonetheless, i "must" have my hashtags, ergo sadly Friendica & i have again fallen out of love it seems i don't for a minute expect this to be the end of the story, given my history... πŸ₯Ί

Infosec.Space

(1/2)

@MsDropbear42
> the Masto instance from which i'm posting this

Doh! I knew infosec.space was a one of those. Brainfart there on my part : P

(2/2)

@MsDropbear42
> see my recent reference post

I feel your pain. I've used *lots* of fediverse apps over nearly 20 years. Some were great, some awful, but none were perfect. I've found even the greatest app will have a heyday, then decline and need replacing.

Pinafore (succeeded by Enafore) was once my go-to, supplemented by FediLab on Android, which eventually become the go-to. Now I mostly use Moshidon on Android. On desktop, vanilla Masto; Elk and Phanpy are worse IMHO.

#FediverseApps

@strypey @MsDropbear42

Friendica has been always the slowest, even when Diaspora was bossing around and Mastodon was just a tiny shy fart...

@freezr
> Friendica has been always the slowest

I presume there were reasons Mike moved on to create Hubzilla. They must have been backend reasons, as the interfaces of Mike's apps all look pretty much the same.

The only reason for Friendica to exist in 2026 - at least in its current form - is that nobody has built a fediverse server on a production-grade stack (Rust, Elixir, Go, even Python) that has all the same power user features.

Maybe someone could build this on Bonfire or Emissary?

@strypey @elena

I never used any of the Friendica features, because I was never interested in replacing Facebook, that I left to use in 2010.

The only point (to me) to use Friendica is the federation with #Diaspora, actually on my stream Diaspora users are the most active ones.

Besides that, Friendica has a better threading mode and long thread by default as Diaspora.

@freezr
> I never used any of the Friendica features

> The only point (to me) to use Friendica is the federation with Diaspora

> Friendica has a better threading mode and long thread by default

Ummm ... how are these not Friendica features?

@elena

@strypey @elena

I was referring about groups, calendars, rss, photo album, etc...

@freezr
> I was referring about groups, calendars, rss, photo album, etc...

Ah, so what you mean was, you didn't use all the of the Friendica features. Which is hardly surprising, because ...

> The feature set is amazing, but the performance of the aging GLAMP stack and the UX of the 'squeeze it wherever it fits' interface leave a lot to be desired.

It would be a serious project to learn how to use all the features, while wrestling with the sluggish and confusing interface.

@elena