Friendica

Last reviewed Sep 13, 2026 · 845 words

Friendica is 16 years old, talks to more networks than any other fediverse server, and looks like it. Those three facts are the whole review. It was federating with Diaspora and pulling RSS feeds into a timeline while Mastodon was still years away, its post model is Facebook's rather than Twitter's, and its interface has never had the redesign the newer projects got. The 1,688 stars are modest against Mastodon's tens of thousands, but the people running it tend to have run it for a decade, which tells you something about the software.

Federation breadth is the reason it exists

Out of the box Friendica speaks ActivityPub, so it follows and is followed by Mastodon, Pixelfed and the rest of the current fediverse. It also still speaks the Diaspora protocol and its own DFRN protocol, which matters if you have friends on those older networks. Then there are the addons: any RSS or Atom feed can be followed as if it were a person, and connector addons have come and gone as the commercial networks opened or closed their APIs, the Twitter one being the obvious casualty and Bluesky the recent addition. If your reason to self-host social is "one timeline that reaches everyone I know, wherever they are", nothing else in the social category comes close.

It's the Facebook shape, not the Twitter shape

Posts have no character limit, support formatted text and inline images, and are threaded as conversations rather than a flat stream of replies. There are groups (the feature formerly called forums, where a group account rebroadcasts posts from members), photo albums with per-album permissions, an events calendar with invitations, and per-post privacy that lets you publish to a circle of contacts rather than to the world. That is the feature set a family or a club actually wants, and it is why Friendica is listed as a Facebook alternative rather than a Twitter one. A person coming from Mastodon will find it slower and more deliberate; a person coming from Facebook will find it familiar.

The worker cron is the install step everyone forgets

Friendica is a PHP application on MariaDB, and everything asynchronous, which is to say all federation, runs through a worker you have to schedule. Miss it and the site looks fine while nothing you post ever leaves the server. On a bare-metal install that is one cron line:

*/10 * * * * cd /var/www/friendica && php bin/worker.php

The official container image covers this with a second container from the same image running the cron entrypoint, so the compose setup is the application container, that cron container, a MariaDB container and a volume for the data directory. The 512 MB figure is honest for a personal instance of a few users; federation with a busy network fills the queue quickly, and a 2 GB box is where I would start for a community. Keep an eye on the worker queue in the admin panel during the first week, because it is the earliest sign that the box is undersized.

The dated interface is a real cost

The default theme, Frio, is responsive and works on a phone, but it reads as 2015 next to Mastodon's clients, and the settings pages are deep and many. There is no polished first-party mobile app; you use the web interface or a third-party Mastodon-API client, which Friendica supports well enough for reading and posting but not for every feature. Expect to spend the first evening finding settings rather than configuring them. For a technical owner that is a nuisance. For the relatives you wanted to move off Facebook it is the reason the project fails, so be honest about who you are hosting for.

Mastodon is the safer pick for most people, Hubzilla for the curious

If you want a fediverse presence for yourself or a small group and you want it to feel modern, run Mastodon or one of its lighter cousins, and accept the shorter posts. If Friendica's breadth appeals but you also want nomadic identity, where your account can move between servers, Hubzilla shares Friendica's ancestry and goes further in that direction at the cost of even more complexity. Friendica sits between them: more social features than Mastodon, more approachable than Hubzilla, and the better choice specifically when the goal is a Facebook-style group with reach into the fediverse.

What I'd do

For a family or club that wants groups, events and albums under its own domain, Friendica in the official container with MariaDB, the worker cron verified on day one, and a 2 GB VM with nightly database dumps. Register it on a domain you intend to keep for years, since moving a federated identity is painful. For a personal account or a public community that wants to look current, Mastodon, and follow the Friendica people from there; federation means you do not have to pick the same software they did.