Friendica

About

Friendika is open-source software for distributed social computing. It is written in PHP and uses the OAuth standard for sharing data with other nodes.

Pages

• /archive: old stuff that probably will never be needed

Installation

Some necessary things they don't seem to mention:

• To make a user the admin (and thereby activate the admin panel) for them, you have to add this to the .htconfig.php file:<php>$a->config['admin_email'] = 'your.admin.email@example.com';</php>Note that this is not the same as the user's identity address; it needs to be the actual contact email address entered in the user's profile. (Also, it isn't necessary to restart the web server after making this change; just reload a Friendica web page, and an "admin" link should appear on the top right.)
• To install connectors and other plugins, you have to download the necessary files separately. Instructions are here.

Connecting

• Twitter, StatusNet, and Facebook: see Connectors
• Diaspora: enter the Diaspora user's "site ID" (not sure if this is the correct term, but it's the email address that uniquely identifies them across all nodes, and typically has their home node's domain name in the email address) in the "Connect/Follow" field in the "Contacts" tab.
• RSS/Atom: enter the URL for the RSS/Atom feed in the "Connect/Follow" field
• mailing lists: not sure how this works

There was something tricky about the base URL for the API, I can't remember the details except that there were 3 URLs listed and what you want to enter is the part that they all have in common, which was something like "domain.name/API/" (specifically not including "OAuth/"). I think this was for StatusNet, but will have to check.

Updates

The update process does not always go smoothly. If you see a message like this in the admin db_updates area:

Executing update_1141 failed. Check system logs.

...then what you need to do is view the update.php file, manually execute the given SQL (adjusting permissions or whatever is necessary until it has executed), and then click the "DB updates" link again to get the list of failed updates (in this case, it should show 1141) and then click on the link which says "Mark success (if update was manually applied)".

Wish List

• a way to see what the security settings were (especially which other sites are being cross-posted to) after submitting a post
• a way to filter by source-site (e.g. don't show posts originating on Facebook) as opposed to viewing only posts from a given site
• a way to put up site notices/links in various places -- top of page, left side...
• the search feature is already an improvement over the one on G+, but it could be improved further
  • choose scope within which to search
  • available more universally instead of having to hunt through the tabs to find it
• Viewing post "in context" should let you comment if commenting is allowed

Links

• home page
• Wikipedia
• EncycloMundi

Screenshots

• 

  Friendika's contact management page editing a sample contact

• 

  detail of contact editor showing options

Notes

• See this thread for links to some useful tools