Facebook alternative from 2010. Pre-dates diaspora* by a few months.

Remember diaspora*? In summer 2010, four young fellows asked for $12,000 of crowdfunding so they could spend the summer developing a free, open-source, decentralised Facebook alternative. Mind you, summer 2010 was when Cambridge Analytica was still a hot topic. So they got $320,000, and the mainstream media wrote about a “Facebook killer” in development.

They started in May, 2010. It was in late autumn when they delivered a first, very early alpha release that was very incomplete and only ran on Mac servers. It took years until even a first beta release, not to mention replacing the whole dev team.

Friendica (originally Mistpark) was developed by one man. In four months, from March to July, 2010. With zero budget. And Mistpark, as it was when it was first released in July, 2010, could have easily mopped the floor with today’s diaspora*, feature-wise, without even breaking a sweat.

Friendica does not try to be a Facebook clone. It tries to be “like Facebook, but way better”. With lots of unnecessary cruft not taken over, but with all-new features integrated. For example, Friendica can be used as a full-blown blog with all text formatting shebang you could possibly imagine a blog to have, all the way to an unlimited number of images that can be embedded within the text, like, with text above the image and more text below the image.

By the way, Friendica comes with a built-in file storage complete with a file manager where you can upload images or whatever. Unlike on Mastodon and Lemmy, your images don’t sink into some data nirvana.

Unlike all the microblogging stuff in the Fediverse, Friendica does not have any arbitrary character limit.

Remember Google+? It was a full-on diaspora* rip-off. Everyone things Google+ had invented circles. Google+ had actually stolen diaspora*'s aspects. But Friendica had them first, even before diaspora*, and calls them lists.

Also, Friendica has been supporting moderated discussion groups at various levels of privacy from the get-go.

But Friendica’s biggest killer feature is and has always been that it can connect to a whole lot of stuff. It can connect to the entire ActivityPub-using Fediverse, it can connect to diaspora*, it can connect to anything that uses OStatus, it can cross-post to WordPress and compatible blogs, it can subscribe to RSS and Atom feeds while generating its own Atom feeds, it can “federate” via e-mail, its built-in chat is XMPP-compatible. You can also integrate a Bluesky account, you can integrate a Tumblr account, you can integrate an 𝕏 account (but the node admin still has to shell out a couple million dollars for a full API key to be able to make full use of it), and for a few months around 2012, you could even integrate a Facebook account into Friendica until Facebook made extracting content to third parties illegal.

The idea was that your friends are all over the place, you’re on Friendica, and you can stay in touch with all your friends without having to use all the stuff that your friends use. You can stay in touch with them on Friendica even though they’re all over the place.