FreeGameDev

Tried to subscribe to https://freegamedev.net/profile/fgd_general. Got error from Mastodon instance: "Unfortunately, there was an error looking up the remote account".

The "connect" button on the profile doesn't seem to work with ActivityPub (Mastodon etc.) yet. I filed a bug report about it.Thanks for testing!

For those wondering: if you cut and paste either

{l Code}: {l Select All Code}

https://freegamedev.net/profile/fgd_general

or

{l Code}: {l Select All Code}

fgd_general@freegamedev.net

into the connection dialog on your Mastodon page it works fine apparently.

The Friendica registration requires approval by the administrator, right? I didn't get any email though.

Currently yes as it is still in testing. Hmm, I approved you though. That is a bit what I feared since Friendica doesn't have a SMTP Mailer (yet) and php mails get often sorted into the spam folder. Let me do some checks, but most likely it is a spam sorting issue.

Edit: your account was created though: https://freegamedev.net/profile/charlie
You can't login? Or you just didn't get a notification email that it was approved?

I hope I can get the FreeGamer Blog comments to work with Friendica though this:
https://git.friendi.ca/lubuwest/friendica-comment Doesn't work with the latest Friendica version and also seems very inefficient.

The new profile of the blog is:
https://freegamedev.net/profile/freegamer

As a current snapshot on the ongoing evaluation:

- It works fine overall, but ActivityPub support is a bit of an ongoing construction site so to speak (quite a few things work better than in HubZilla, others less so)
- The "frio" theme while overall much nicer than the alternatives, requires Javascript and isn't really actively maintained. I also don't really like the main portal page it gives.
- Also the there is an issue with the potentially nice XMPP webclient with the "frio" theme (Bootstrap3 clashing with Bootstrap4)
- I tried a few optimisations, but on the relatively cheap hosting I have it is quite slow and I don't see this improving much in the near future. Hubzilla is a bit faster (largely due to lazy-loading of content...)

So to summarize, I am a bit torn right now if I should continue with Friendica or not. The next version coming in June/July will probably fix the remaining ActivityPub issues, but otherwise I doubt that there will be much change on the issues I see. Edit: I guess I'll leave it running a bit more and wait for further updates.

Edit: I am also getting waaaaay to much SPAM registrations on Friendica. I guess that's due to the platforms relative higher popularity?

Found some ways to speed it up a little bit and also implemented a better SMTP e-mailer addon.

For those that tried it before and had issue with getting a registration email, can you try again or request a password reset from the login page?

I hate social networks. I think it should all be like imageboards without identities, and the more-federated stuff like Diaspora seems to attract a very niche community. I couldn't imagine hanging around in the FLOSS gaming circles. Who would be there? Just you guys.

Mastodon is full of open-source game developers. That's one of the main reasons I am interested in Friendica as the compatibility with Mastodon is much better.
But I am also starting to think that even more game developers have completely switched to Discord as their main communication channel The Veloren Discord has for example a few hundred active members

lol discord.

Mastodon is full of open-source game developers. That's one of the main reasons I am interested in Friendica as the compatibility with Mastodon is much better.

That's sort of my point. Open source game development doesn't get you laid. Programmers are anti-social. Open source game developers are obviously programmers.

Now, if we're talking Discord and "game developers" (open source notwithstanding) there were a number of them on Mastodon a couple years ago, and I like them even less. You get a lot of the bastards who use Unity and Godot to "develop" games for Steam or whatever, the kinds of people who don't care about Godot's lack of LTS because their idea of a "long" development cycle is 9 months. I've taken shits longer than that. I don't find myself drawn to all the skiddies and other undesirables in the indie game development community, at least on a personal level. They smell.

Maybe you should get off the internet then

P.S.: Please stop derailing all sorts of threads with widely OT comments.

I don't see how anything I say is OT. You say you want a community, I say to look somewhere with normal people.

Continuing with the general assessment of Friendica (and in proxy also Hubzilla for which most applies as well and which in addition has by design only limited ActivityPub support)... on my current managed server infrastructure (a relatively high-powered, but php only shared hosting environment) it feels sluggish even as a more or less single user instance. There are in theory some new ways to improve that (Redis/APCu caching), but they are not possible on this shared host at all.

However if I was to move Friendica off this shared server and onto the root server I am also renting (which runs for example the XMPP server), then other non-php solutions suddenly become feasible which are probably overall more performant and also seem more actively developed (Friendica is actively developed, but its developers have to apparently deal with a lot of legacy cruft). Mainly Pleroma and maybe Misskey come to mind, both of which treat ActivityPub support as first class communication protocols.

Pleroma is highly efficient (Erlang) and should scale very well. It also supports nearly all Mastodon UI frontends and mobile clients which gives a really nice choice of UI options (even ones running without JavaScript). Disadvantage is that for some reason the existing group support isn't merged into the main code-base.

Misskey seems to be (have not tested it) a well working NodeJS app, with a very nice UI and plenty of customisation options. Disadvantage is that most of the developer's documentation is in Japanese and that it isn't compatible with the Mastodon client API like Pleroma.

One caveat however: Contrary to Friendica and Hubzilla, neither of these allow RSS feed aggregation out of the box, which we use for the Planets. However given that Hubzilla doesn't federate these well to ActivityPub and Friendica also has some issues in that regard (more likely to get fixed however), this wasn't properly working so far anyways. Thus this opens the question what to do with the Planets. I am experimenting with a ActivityPub enabled Wordpress option, but I am open to other suggestions.

Quite a problem.

Sadly I don't know much about all that stuff to help with this.

Just to clarify some concerns:
1. The Hubzilla instance on social.freegamedev.net will stay (but I am moving it to another server within the next 2 months, so some light DNS issue might pop up again, sorry). But since it allows cloning instances, that is always good as a backup
2. The Planets on Hubzilla will probably stay until/if I find a significantly better solution. So far no luck, but I am exploring some options to have better ActivityPub support.
3. The XMPP server will stay, but accounts will not be linked to Hubzilla anymore most likely.

But I'll likely remove the Friendica testing instance in the coming days. Friendica is generally speaking nice, but on my specific hosting situation not ideal as outlined above.

Friendica is gone.

But the good news is that with the upcoming Hubzilla 4.2 after all the ActivityPub support has improved, especially in regards to threaded comments. Still far from perfect, but it is reasonably usable.