I was pleasantly surprised at the anti-climatic and uneventful outcome of your friend's platform transition! That is indeed great!

As someone who has only been maintaining a #Friendica instance for a few days now I am curious; did your friend cite any reasons for their move to #Mastadon? Was his instance for personal use, or open publicly? I imagine it would take some pretty major problems (with the former) or benefits (to the latter) to justify transitioning a public node! ...But like I said, I'm new to this and just trying to get a broader understanding of what people are doing with these amazing open-source platforms, and what sorts of general consensus exists around them. Thanks for sharing this!

Hum, at the moment, if you switched to Hubzilla, I could still get your posts but I wouldn't get any comments on your posts from anyone else but you. We have yet to fix that.

What do you expect from a blog?

Well, something must have improved; from this end, I can now actually see other people's comments on your posts, which I couldn't before.

@Vladimir You could also have a look at Osada, which also offers the same "articles" functionality, which is what the blog on HZ is called. Unlike Hubzilla, though, it is based on ActivityPub with support for Zot6 (the next generation of Hubzilla's protocol.)
@Hypolite Petovan, do you have any Osada contacts?

Hmm, what doesn't seem to work is comment replies. I can't see any comments on this post that were replies to other comments, only top level ones. I can see those only when I go directly to your profile. Maybe this info will be of help.

As for Osada, the connections would show up as AP in your list, but if you clicked on their profile, it should say Osada there somewhere, even if it's on the login page.

For point 2, you can set up a delegated Friendica account that will hold only your posts about your ceramic work.
For point 1, unfortunately you're limited to Friendica themes, modulo color choices/background image.

@Tanja No one that I can see at first glance in my contacts. Do you have a recommendation for someone I should follow on Osada?

It definitely makes sense on a commercial all-in-one platform, but less in a volunteer open source software context where projects gain from focusing on a single feature.

Currently I have separate:

• Social media (Friendica)
  
• Email, contact and calendar (FastMail)
  
• Cloud storage (NextCloud)
  
• Blog (WordPress)

All those features were single-handedly provided by Google, but I'm currently trying to extract myself from it.

Thank you!

I would also be very interested in this blog feature! However as I try to imagine it's implimentation I'm finding a blurred line... @Vladimir, what would you imagine would differentiate the blog posts from 'regular' posts? Would blog posts just end up being normal posts that are basically 'tagged' as blogs (either literally or via something behind the scenes, so to speak) and then they would just be displayed in a different manner? Or are there some more fundamental differences that I'm just overlooking here?

Honestly, I think I'd be even more interested in an integrated wiki feature where anyone can create a personal wiki and if they desire they can add users to collaborate on it. Maybe it would be just a pretty standard wiki for the Friendica Instance, and users of that instance could create pages and then add users to collab on those pages (rather than each user having something more like their entire own wiki). In practice I'm not sure if there is much difference, but I rather like this idea and think it would be in the spirit of open-source and collaboration much in alignment with Friendica's values.

These are just ideas I'm throwing out... I would love to actually get involved personally helping out and be productive with more than just ideas, in the true spirit of open-source! haha. But as far as a blog or wiki go, I think I'd be in way over my head trying to start either myself. I am really just grateful for what Friendica is already!

I see a few of these questions were addressed above; I'm sorry I missed those comments before posting this...

As I think more about the wiki idea... I believe it could be more easily implemented as an addon that would simply integrate Friendica users in to an existing wiki platform. Any thoughts on this? I'm sure there are some 'gotchas' I'm failing to foresee, but I think it could work and be much easier than reinventing the wheel with an integrated wiki.

TIL I can partially read Chinese!

But this would make Friendica as an identity provider, which it probably isn't meant to be.

The best would be to have a separate Wiki on which you can invite anyone. It would be less convenient, granted, but it would save volunteers hundreds of hours of work to combine both.

Do you have a recommendation for someone I should follow on Osada?

No, I don't have any Osada contacts yet myself.

Also, I take back what I said earlier, all comments made it through by now. Apparently it just took a while for them to federate.

Michael (for some reason I can't mention you), I honestly don't know. I tried it out a while back but I didn't really see the value of it over Hubzilla. But even if he did, doesn't necessarily mean it's dead.

I see your point. That was kind of why I went back and said an addon might be better to make it work with an existing system... but maybe even a better option would be to just use something like LDAP on both wiki and Friendica... which could also solve my idea of offering users free linuxlusers.com email accounts and limited shell access... although I'm not sure I want that much responsibility, haha. Just thinking out loud here, like @Vladimir haha ;) I do agree with you @Hypolite Petovan, that it would probably be a big 'can of worms' to open by implementing it directly in Friendica. Thanks for brainstorming with me though! ha

Yes, we do have a LDAP addon!

Hubzilla, Zap, and Osada all have wikis, blogs, cloud storage, groups, events, social networking, and other things that I haven't had time to explore yet. Zap is nicely done. Hubzilla does more but is confusing. I tried Osada once and it's like Zap but I discovered I don't care for Mastodon people.

Every network type is designed for different use cases. The beauty of the Fediverse is the ability to choose the one that fits yours yet still interconnect with users who choose other network types.

@Vladimir I just remembered something, there's this for a federating blogging option:

Also, somebody put together this great website listing free and open alternatives to many of the proprietary services: https://switching.social/

@hypolite@friendica.mrpetovan.comDid he kept the same Id ? You didn't have to add the new one to your contact lists ?

That's some interesting trolling, to pick up a year old thread and then want to "expert" an actual expert about a feature that doesn't exist in the platforms involved in the discussion.