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--- fediverse-notes-servers [2026/08/11 07:26] – z428
+++ fediverse-notes-servers [2026/08/17 09:36] (current) – z428
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+[[fediverse-notes|Fediverse Notepad]]
 ==== Friendica ====
 Used to be my main vehicle on the Fediverse until 06/2026. Still fancy the platform but parted ways with it in day-to-day use. Somehow it seems impossible to get it to work for my environment with a reasonable performance and resource consumption as I learnt at least four times on different servers.
   * (+) Connects not just to ActivityPub but also to Tumblr, Bluesky, Diaspora - and a couple of others I don't use. This includes even odd use cases such as posting messages retrieved from e-mail systems / IMAP servers and likewise sharing articles to e-mail recipients.
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   * (-) In some cases, Friendica has glitches that are extremely hard (not to say impossible) to recover if you're not an instance administrator, such as Tumblr or Bluesky connector getting stuck, lagging behind or otherwise misbehaving. In most cases, too, "just" running an instance managed by someone else doesn't help either; it seems the best way to run Friendica is being in full control of operating system, database, filesystem, webserver too, all along with the Friendica service itself. This isn't a good starting point.
   * (-) Some limitations that are there aren't obvious. Like, Tumblr posts are mirrored but not responses or messages - because the Tumblr API doesn't support that but still it's not obvious. Same way, Bluesky direct messages don't come through, and Bluesky contacts appear to be in some way different to other contacts in example when it comes to adding them to circles.
-  * (-) In general and unfortunately, it seems Friendica development has massively slowed down the last couple of years. The latest stable release is 2025-12, released in Dec 2025. For a while, there was a two-release-per-year strategy. Now, the current RC, as of writing this in April 2026, is dubbed 2026-04RC. In the past, more than once there have been situations of odd errors introduced with one of the releases to keep features broken for half a year or more.
+  * (-) In general and unfortunately, it seems Friendica development has massively slowed down the last couple of years. When I started using it, there was that notion of having two releases a year, more or less. Right now, releases are way more seldom and more or less unpredictable, which is a difficult thing in an ever-evolving ecosystem knowing that a lot of other projects move on faster, a lot of new projects pop up every now and then and at the very least from a federation aspect, this might cause its very own share of issues talking compatibility and interoperability.
   * (-) A difficult side-effect of the long development cycles is: Even with issues being marked as "fixed" in github, in most cases it essentially means they make it to the RC or dev branch which leaves even relevant fixes waiting there for quite a while so you're either left living with the issue or nudging your instance admin to go for an RC release (which might be a bad idea from other points of view) or go for a single-user instance with an RC release yourself, which is obviously not a good idea unless you have plenty of time at hand or this is a service you don't really need to be around but then again why bother at all?
   * (-) All along with this, it seems Friendica has serious performance issues in circumstances that are hard to reproduce. In the end, my single-user instance consumed incredibly hefty amount of system ressources, even this way got stuck more than just once and apparently no one was really able to figure out why that happened. I also managed to take down the instance I feel grateful for hosting my data in between 2021 and 2025, several times, for similar reasons, and I suffered from performance degradations in both web interface and mobile apps repeatedly, in some cases it was possible to have these reproduced, but in the end none of them really have been resolved.