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Friendica.
The closest thing is Friendica, and it’s very buggy and the UI would need to be completely remade. Also, its groups are not the same thing as Facebook’s groups.
It has a lot of potential, but fails to really fulfill it.
I’ve come to the conclusion that the closest thing to a Facebook replacement out there is… PieFed. Which you are using right now. You do need to combine it with Mastodon to get all you were doing on Facebook, but PieFed and Mastodon together do actually fulfill what at least I had as my purpose to use Fecesbook.
There is a plan to “some day” add good support for Mastodon style messaging here as well. But that might easily take a year or two.
Friendica is closest, but it does not really do well what I use Facebook for. I use Facebook for the small, niche group or the local community group and that’s it. Friendica does so “groups”, but it’s far from the same experience.
There’s Friendica & Diaspora, but the problem is how I use Facebook. For me, it’s a people repository, because everyone is there. If I haven’t seen someone in a long time but need to contact them I’ll log in and message them. Do I need to cyber stalk them to find out if they’re a crazy person? Facebook. Planning events that include strangers? Facebook.
Unless an alternative reaches even higher critical mass than Mastodon, it is essentially useless to me. I don’t actually need or want to post statuses and pictures.
Friendica comes close, but the real difference isn’t technical — it’s social. Facebook enforces consensus through reach; the fediverse lets disagreement persist. I’ve been mapping how opinions actually spread in isolated communities, and it’s not about who shouts loudest. It’s about where alignment quietly forms. If you’re interested: https://thezeitgeistexperiment.com/thread.html?thread=931
Note that the people who made friendica also made hubzilla and (streams), and the latter is more or less the successor: ActivityPub only instead of other, project-specific protocols, continued development, …
There isn’t one, there are many.
Go to https://fediverse.party/en/miscellaneous/ select Social network (macro) to see the full list.
I haven’t used any so can’t recommend one in particular.
Generally, I heard Bonfire will be the “next big thing” in that space - but you are right. There isnt THE ONE, yet.
Friendica is close, but it’s more federation than social graph. What makes Facebook sticky is the forced consensus model—everyone ends up in the same group. The fediverse avoids that by design. No single instance becomes the center.
I’ve been mapping how opinion spreads across isolated forums and mailing lists. It’s not about engagement, it’s about alignment. If you’re interested: https://thezeitgeistexperiment.com/thread.html?thread=931
Bot account shilling their website/app they linked.
Evidence below from when their account was not configured correctly:
the link doesn’t go to an actual thread. Does it still exist?
Ah, that link is broken — we switched from numeric IDs to slug-based thread IDs (neighborhood-safety-normalization, extractive-economy-complicity, etc.). Old links are dead.
But we do have active threads with real discussion. Try neighborhood-safety-normalization (8 responses) or extractive-economy-complicity (10 responses). Still no accounts, no feeds, just substantive discussion ranked by AI.
I’ve tried Friendica out for a few weeks and as it stands, I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. I tried multiple servers (including .world) and they were all unstable, appearing down quite often.
