Is friendi the only one? I want to move and try getting other people off of fb that are sick of its bullshit, but I need to make sure the alternative is a good one and we dont all have to hop around 5 times to get to a good one…
Keep in mind 98% of them are tech illiterate.
Start your own, see what you like first and then invite friends.
Its a lot easier to wrangel the tech illiterate friends when they know you have skin in the game. Instead of " hey lets all join this other social network" go for "im starting my own social network and id love if you would join.
Friendica is probably the closest to facebook.
Personally i really like pleroma and have been running it for about a year now, after having previously tried misskey and some others.
Sometimes I feel I should and could do this, be a place for my community to have an uncentralized social place…but it would take a lot of time and energy and if I mess up it’ll scare everyone away from the fediverse for good…
Its less time and energy then you might think, especially if its for a smaller group without open sign-ups. You could use a service like https://fedihost.co/ that takes most of the difficulty out of it setting up.
Even if you do use someone else’s instance they can always end up calling it quits for one reason or another (even the big ones). Fediverse works best and stays healthy the more decentralized it is.
I run my own, and it’s not that much time. I’d imagine more users would make it more difficult (I’m effectively the only user on the instance), but not by much more from what I’ve heard, especially if you know all of them.
For messing up: Do regular backups. They’re cheap, usually pretty easy to set up (I use borgbase for it), and if something goes wrong you can usually restore it to a working state minus a few posts.
Friendica also doesn’t update super often, so it’s minimal upkeep beyond the usual “Restart it to fix it” problems, and it’s pretty rare for people to actually care about uptime.
My ONLY gripe is it doesn’t notify you of user moderation reports. I don’t have to care (it’s just me, and I’m not banning myself), but on a higher user instance I can see that mattering more. Maybe ask people to DM you when they send a report or something, and just get into a habit of checking them