WindfluechterNet Blog

Some weeks ago a more or less large scandal popped up in the media: Cambridge Analytica misused data from Facebook. Many users of Facebook were unhappy about abusing their personal data and deleted their Facebook accounts – or at least tried some alternatives like Friendica, Hubzilla, Diaspora, Mastodon and others.

There has been a significant increase in user count since then and this gave a general boost for the networks.

Apropos networks… basically there are two large networks: The Federation (Diaspora, Socialhome) and The Fediverse (GNU Social, Mastodon, postActiv, Pleroma). Within the two networks all solution can exchange information like posts, comments, user information and such, or in other words: they federate with each other. So, when you use Mastodon your posts won’t be available to Diaspora users and vice versa as they use different protocols for federation.

And here Friendica and Hubzilla do have their advantage: both are able to federate with both networks. Sean Tilley has some more information in his article “A quick guide to The Free Network” on medium.com.

Another great resource you can use to find more about alternatives to Facebook is the great new Fediverse Wiki.

From my point of view I would recommend either Friendica or Hubzilla, depending on what you want:

• Friendica is in my opinion the best solution to have best of both worlds, i.e. Fediverse und Federation. It has active developers and a good and helping community. It concentrates on the social network topic.
• Hubzilla is a more complete approach: you can add addons to have a cloud space, a wiki or create web pages.

Both offers you to create multiple profiles with one account (Friendica: profiles, Hubzilla: channels) and of course you have a fine-grained control about your content. There is also a fresh Youtube channel describing some Friendica features. Although it is in German, others might get some helpful hints as well from those videos.

Which alternative will be the best for you is up to you to decide. All alternatives have their pros and cons. If you don’t already have a website, cloud space or such, Hubzilla might be the best choice for you. If you don’t need such additional functions, you might be best suited with Friendica. If you like to install docker images, Mastodon will make you happy.

In the end, it’s all about choice! You will have better control about your own data in all cases. You can run your own instance, make it private only, or you can join one of the available servers and try out what best suites you. For Friendica you can find some public servers on https://dir.friendica.social.

I’m running a Friendica node on https://nerdica.net/ as well as a Hubzilla hub on https://silverhaze.eu/ – feel invited to try both and register on either one to have a look onto some alternatives for Facebook.

After all: Decentralize and spread the workd! Use the alternatives you have and don’t sell you privacy to the big players like Facebook and Google if you don’t need to. 🙂

PS: If you are already on one of those alternative networks, please feel free to connect me on my Friendica node or Hubzilla hub!