I plan to end my Facebook account before January 19. I like the format and would like something similar in the Fediverse. Also, I need a good Facebook alternative I can show people when trying to convince them to leave Facebook.
So what is the best Facebook alternative as of 2025? Frendica, Diaspora or Pleroma? Or something new and promising?
The problem is that Facebook isn’t just about keeping up with your friends and family. It’s an engagement platform designed to keep your attention by showing you memes and “news” and videos and ads that it knows you like. Most people have become addicted to this slow and steady stream of dopamine. You’re not going to get people off their crack addiction by substituting it with marijuana.
As these social platforms become more powerful, it’s up to each of us to personally find the strength to wean ourselves away from these platforms that once promised socialization but have quickly become little more than propaganda and influencing and ad-serving machines.
It’s great we’re seeing some alternatives but, aside from a small cohort, most people are not going to find the likes of Bluesky, Mastodon, or Lemmy engaging enough to give them that hit that they’re used to.
All hail the algorithm.
Personally, I used to be the early adopter who was on all these platforms well before most of the public heard about them. In recent years, I’ve either deleted or stopped using my social accounts (or have chosen to use less engaging ones, like Lemmy). This has given me more time to live a life.
Boredom is something I embrace. Rather than turning to a screen to occupy me; I’ll take a nap, make some tea, journal, go for a walk, do some cleaning, build something, practice something, read a book or comic. It’s not as dynamic, for sure, but I get to experience and learn more about myself instead of needlessly observing the lives of others. Boredom offers a renewed sense of self and humanity. Frankly, I’m afraid younger generations won’t know what benefits and beauty boredom has to offer.
Best would probably be if I quit social media. I find arguing on Facebook, Reddit and Lemmy very addictive.
However, I prefer it if my local boomers are on a slightly addictive but open and transparent social media, which isn’t controlled by an oligarch or random orange fascist.
I want something that is so similar to Facebook, that I basically can post a link on Facebook and when the boomer follow that link they’ll effortlessly create a new account and start using the fediverse FB clone, because that’s where I’ll post my content from now on.
That just doesn’t exist. Probably the biggest obstacle to large-scale fediverse adoption at the moment is just that it requires a little more effort to sign up. Lots of people get turned off by picking an instance
The fix to that problem seems trivial though.
Hopefully there will pop up some commercial FOSS fediverse FB alternatives now when Facebook is about to go all in on the crazy. Or that the EU will pour some big money on the existing alternatives.
Anyway, Frendica seems to be the best option right now so I’ll give it a serious try.
Friendica is probably the best choice. It’s the most popular with the most servers and users, and is explicitly designed to be like facebook, and uses Activitypub.
Pleroma, judging from the FAQ; strives to be more like twitter. And as for diaspora, I don’t know much at all about it.
Thanks! Yeah, I realized Pleroma isn’t what I was looking for.
@petrescatraian @fxomt @sith Diaspora is part of Fediverse https://fediverse.party/en/diaspora/
Ah, my mistake. I’ll edit it out
@fxomt No worries. Thing is, on a serious note, that it doesn’t federate with Friendica, but rather Friendica federates with it (through diaspora’s own protocol). That means that you can follow Mastodon accounts along with diaspora accounts on Friendica, but you cannot follow Mastodon accounts on Diaspora (nor vice-versa). So if you want to keep tabs with the world, Friendica is the better option.
I’m going to tell you my core problem, just to get some feedback/vent a little: i’ve wanted to end my Facebook account since Cambridge Analytica. I hate the feed. But Facebook has one key thing keeping me locked in at the moment - Events.
Back in the pre and early Facebook stages, there were websites that had well-curated, broadish event calendars for my city. These are now universally dead. Websites dedicated to the local music scene? Also pretty much dead (RIP punkottawa.com). Some have tried to get something going independently in later stages, but all have failed. Even my favourite college radio station, which has folks super tied into the community and local music scene and plug stuff on the air frequently, has pretty much abandoned their community events calendar. The problem gets worse if I’m travelling outside of the city, in that I have no clue where to even start looking effectively outside of Facebook (@ me, Montrealers and Torontonians in particular). Stuff like bandsintown is ok, but misses a lot when you’re more into bar gigs than concerts
I’ve yet to find a non-Facebook approach that captures events I’d be interested in that doesn’t miss something. RSS feeds from websites for known gig spaces (either natively or with a web2rss thing) can get part of the way there, but there’s been cases of stuff happening at new/unexpected venues (a hot sauce store here, at some point, became a gig venue) that I’ve only found out about via Facebook. And this ignoring non-music related stuff that occasionally comes up serendipitously.
I’ve yet to come up with a great solution, and that kinda ticks me off.
There’s absolutely a need for a public space for friends, businesses, venues, city halls, journalists, et al to congregate. It used to be a literal town hall, radio, newspapers, and weekly periodicals. And then AOL, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. All of these need some sort of funding to operate efficiently - either by tax payers, subscriptions, or advertising. This need for funding is what screws everything up.
There also used to be a time when Instagram was relevant. Then they introduced the algorithmic timeline, which meant I wouldn’t see event announcements for days after they occurred. Advertisers want results so engagement is more important than informing the public. If someone finds what they want at the top of their feed and clicks out of the app, that’s less opportunity to show ads.
Twitter used to be the best way to find out what was happening in real time in my immediate vicinity. Places stopped posting on there, the algorithm took over, then you know who took over. I’m hopeful about Bluesky but I’m not sure how they’re paying the bills.
This might not cover all the venues but you might be able to find booking agents with newsletters you can subscribe to. Promoting concerts should be one of those things where venues are desperate to use all sorts of platforms to get people in the door. Local radio stations are usually pretty good at promoting smaller shows on their websites too. My local newspaper is actually one of my best resources for discovering new venues and pop ups.
One of my local breweries was publishing an rss calendar feed for their weekly events. This was awesome until their “subscription” expired at the end of the year (not sure why they don’t just have a google calendar). I should speak with the owner to see what her reasoning was. My suspicion is that they want to track engagement on Instagram and the newsletters.
On the other hand, we have the essentially donation-funded fediverse. I’ve been wanting to see servers pop up to host certain things. For example, something like montreal-gov.social and montreal-shows.social where there’s dedicated federated instances for public congregation. I’m not sure if there’s a calendar function in the fediverse but it would seem reasonable to invest effort in. I’m really hoping this is the direction we’re going in. It just makes a lot of sense.
Thanks Blaze! This looks really interesting. Network effect is a factor in what I’m bitching about, but we’ve got OK enough general fediverse participation where I am that this could be/get real useful for me.
Appreciate it, and what you do to promote fediverse stuff in general. Said it before and I’ll say it again - you’re doing good work.
I wish that gained some traction.
I also wish it had a name that is easy to intuit a pronunciation.
I just don’t go places
Not just public events but private ones too. I just invited 30 people to an event this month. There’s a lot of people in there that I don’t contact enough on a regular basis to get their email. It’s really tough to put something like this together without Facebook these days
You are on Lemmy and you are leaving Facebook, you don’t need anything else, you’ve got everything already.
I haven’t really been using it but I wanted to throw a shoutout to https://spacehey.com/
Thanks, but it looks a little bit too old school and low budget. These are not people looking for a retro feel or extra privacy. They want something that look and feel like FB.
If you don’t mind a learning curve and having to use the Web interface (because there’s no native mobile app): (streams). From Friendica’s creator.
If (streams) sounds good, but you need a shit-ton of extra features on top (and be it diaspora* connectivity), and you don’t mind an even steeper learning curve: Hubzilla. Also made by the guy who made Friendica.
If you absolutely, absolutely, absolutely must have a dedicated native app on your phone, you’re on Android, and you can live without features such as nomadic identity, multiple channels per account and advanced, fine-grained permission control: Friendica.
If you absolutely, absolutely, absolutely must have a dedicated native app on your phone, but you’re on iOS: Wait for Relatica to have a stable release, then Friendica. (Caveats see above.)
Forget diaspora*. It’s fading out. Shortly before New Year’s Eve, a bunch of big diaspora* pods shut down, and at least according to one stats site, diaspora* lost more than haf its users.
And Pleroma is a Twitter replacement that, just like Mastodon, started out as an alternative UI for GNU social.
@sith As others said, Friendica is clearly a better alternative to Facebook. It has an interface that took cues from it, groups, pages, a calendar where you can create or join events etc.
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