Tag: friendica

Bought a cheap VPS for 9 dollars a year. I spent the last few days figuring out its configuration — I'm a developer after all, not a devops or sysadmin, so I have to spend a lot of time on manuals and fixing basic errors that I made myself :)

But I moved my Friendica server whitelion.me from Moscow to Atlanta. Even fewer ties to the RF, and honestly I felt uneasy keeping a copy of my social-media posts there...

Although I had to fiddle with Friendica updates too, now I've got the process sorted out.

For over a month now I've been actively using IFTTT for cross-posting to social networks. I want to share how I got there and what tricks I resorted to in order to achieve cross-posting close to what I need.

I write on social networks for myself, not for work. And it's convenient for me to write from the place where I spend my time, so SMM software didn't suit me — it's expensive, and on top of that it requires writing from a different place.

Mostly I spend my time on Twitter and Telegram, I post photos on Instagram, and recently I also started doing a podcast on Anchor. Some messages are more convenient to write in one network, some — in another. Besides, I'd like to have at least some control over my messages, so as not to lose them in an instant because of some corporation's decision. That's why I also joined the decentralized social network, the Fediverse, and set up my own personal Friendica, where I simply duplicate my posts from other social networks.

When choosing a solution for joining the Fediverse, I settled on Friendica, because it's in PHP, which I work with every day at work, and if needed I can modify the engine to suit me and deploy it on shared hosting. The only thing I don't like about Friendica is that it doesn't allow guests to leave comments, but since it's more of a backup solution, that's not a critical problem. The other apps I tried or looked at had more critical drawbacks for me.

Many people are switching to decentralized social networks because they don't want corporations tracking them, analyzing them, knowing everything about them. That doesn't really bother me, I've come to terms with it, but what bothers me more is that a corporation can at any time delete all my messages, all my history.

Copying messages by hand is too much of a hassle for me and too costly in terms of time, so I started looking in detail at solutions for automatically posting messages between social networks.