Friending vs Following

Any of Friendica , Hubzilla, and streams provides a somewhat Facebook like experience. Smithereen is an alternative of VK - the Russian Facebook. Diaspora is kind of a hybrid Facebook/Twitter experience, but leaning solidly towards the Facebook side. There are other fediverse attempts to convey this experience; but I am unable to comment on their abilities or current state.

You may not find an “accurate” Facebook-like experience because we left that world behind 13 years ago and these projects have evolved in completely different ways, unconstrained by expectations to be like somebody/anybody else. We’re continuing on with how the web might have evolved if Facebook never existed and thwarted innovation in this space.

We have an interoperable standard (ActivityStreams) and also a standard for single sign-on (OpenWebAuth - built on fediverse technology) which has been ported recently to Pixelfed and Mastodon. If you connect to my streams channel over OpenWebAuth and I grant you permission, you can write on my wall and comment on my posts and view private photos and videos I’ve shared with you- just like Facebook and no matter that we’re hosted on different instances. We have events and groups and media libraries and pages and everything else that Facebook users expect - and a lot of completely new features that they never knew were possible - such as fully nomadic identity.

But there’s still a billion people in that world, who are non-technical, and with a need for an alternative.

While microblogging and follows offer some alternative, I think there’s still a big gap, if the system could model friending, friend requests and a social graph.

It was pointed out that some form of groups could also be important to do this, with the correct level of privacy.

There has always been something here for Facebook folks - and we built around that model and improved and refined it. As you do.

Popping my head in to say that Livejournal definitely had social issues around the decision to use ‘friending’ as terminology and the fact that it implied a stronger relationship than was necessarily there. It’s part of the reason that when Dreamwidth forked from LJ we changed the mechanism to be split into ‘subscribe’ and ‘allow access’ (and I lowkey hate that basically nobody else has used this model since, heh)

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@momijizukamori - Completely agree, the Dreamwidth model has always seemed like a drastic improvement on the Livejournal terminology.