Quick Start on using Friendica
Shelenn Ayres recently shared posted a series on the essentials of getting comfortable with Friendica. I like having tutorials in printed form - as they're much easier to skim through and use than swapping windows on a laptop, so I've pulled all these together as a PDF. It's pretty much identical to the originals apart from minor tweaks so the pagebreak are in reasonable places.
This is recirculated with Shelenn's approval. I'm settling on Friendica as my new home, and this guide helped. Thanks Shelenn.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/f2ropueobszkqcu/Friendica-Quickstart-by-Shelenn-Eyres.pdf?dl=0
Shelenn Ayres recently shared posted a series on the essentials of getting comfortable with Friendica. I like having tutorials in printed form - as they're much easier to skim through and use than swapping windows on a laptop, so I've pulled all these together as a PDF. It's pretty much identical to the originals apart from minor tweaks so the pagebreak are in reasonable places.
This is recirculated with Shelenn's approval. I'm settling on Friendica as my new home, and this guide helped. Thanks Shelenn.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/f2ropueobszkqcu/Friendica-Quickstart-by-Shelenn-Eyres.pdf?dl=0
Thanks for that. Shelenn’s posts helped me get started but I’m now getting lost. A quick skim of this tells me I should have done exactly what you have done. I need it all as a doc, probably printed: that is my next step. Thanks again.
ReplyDeleteWelcome to everyone. Certainly there is more that can be done to update and expand tutorials. This is also welcome by the devs to update their documentation help files. We are all in this together. If you figure out how to do something, take screenshots and write quick tips for others :)
ReplyDeleteThanks for this, and see y'all there shortly!
ReplyDeleteShelenn Ayres Perhaps your contributions can be integrated in the official repository of Friendica at github.com - friendica
ReplyDeleteAlistair Langsford If you're still lost you can ask here and maybe we're able to help you.
ReplyDeleteEric Buijs I provided inputs for their help files. I will be looking closer at the next release because their improvements so far tend to be user experience focused and they need help both with testing and updating user documents.
ReplyDeleteEric Buijs I’m trying to get a handle on what the equivalent of a group/community in G+ is on friendica. I believe they’re called forums? I just don’t seem to be able to get the hang of finding any that match the groups I’m a part of here. Of course, they mayn’t exist. Is there a list of ‘forums’ or whatever the friendica equivalent is?
ReplyDeleteAlistair Langsford One of my posts in the pinned post at the top of my g+ profile explains how to find community forums and another talks about creating one (two ways). In a nutshell, Friendica community forums replace G+ communities out of the box. So let's go over how to find one and post to it first:
ReplyDeleteTo find them, because they aree an advanced account type, instead of using @ followed by a username, we put a ! in the global search box followed by a few letters in the topic of interest. For example if you are looking for Friendica specific support you would put !frie and you will see a list of community forums that start with the word Friendica with one of them being Friendica Support (which you then click on like you would any user you want to connect with. Once you connect with a community forum it will be listed on your "home" page so you can select it to read it.
To post to that community forum, you can insert !Friendica Support on the first line of your post from your network page followed your question OR you can click the forum on your "home" page and it will auto insert if you click the post icon to make a post to it.
On social.isurf we have a local support forum. To find that I enter !iSurf in the global search.
The hint if you forget is in the search box tooltip (for browser users):
@ for users
! for community forums
# for tags
content for keywords
Once you learn how to find and post in community forums, then take the step to learn the two ways to create them.
Shelenn Ayres so if I’m into something that doesn’t seem to have a forum i can create my own and let a few potential members know and try growing it from there?
ReplyDeleteAlistair Langsford Yes but remember I believe only Friendica or Hubzilla users can be members of and see community forums because the other technologies don't have that capability.
ReplyDeleteAlistair Langsford Also, the easiest way to replicate how we did things in G+ on communities is to go to your settings and enable multiple profiles. That will allow you to create community forums (advanced account profiles) that you admin with your same user account. You can set the forum so that others can help run it too.
ReplyDeleteThe alternative is a separate account for each forum which can be tedious. I have one like that as a result of testing but will not likely make others like that.
Why community forums? It is an easy way to send to all members without them being in your groups (circles); it is a good way to have focused searchable archivable conversations (better than G+); and can be public or private.
ReplyDeleteYour groups (circles) start with Friends and Everybody. You can add groups like you could add circles and move your contacts in and out of them as you need. This allows you to send posts to groups of contacts if you like that are not necessarily members of a community forum but have a common interest in general like cats, scifi, music, politics, etc without necessarily exposing those posts to the public free social network of all types. (Just like G+ but better)
For replacing collections, there are two ways: categories or other advanced account types called news or celebrity accounts.
To use categories (what we can calla collection and is different than tags), when you create a post, you can add an existing category or make a new one. After it is posted, any new category will be seen on your profile left. Anyone can click on one of your categories to see all of your posts with that category tag then interact with you on those posts. So this is an effective way to do public interactive collections.
For the collections that you don't want interaction on, rather than setting permissions per post, it is easier to create an advanced account type for news, organizations, or celebrities. Users can only "follow" or subscribe to these rather than "connect" like we do with other users and forums where we have two way interaction.
Which methods you choose are in the hands of the user and how you save the content is also in your hands. Combine that with full control over how your user interface looks and your user experience in terms of privacy and controls, and we have a platform that is better than G+ and FB.
There are 2.7 million users in the free social network and that is growing. To reach billions of users Friendica has easy integration with blogs and Twitter and more. One does not FB to each them. If you want to reach select social network users with a Twitter like account that you can connect with from your Friendica account, there are microblog solutions like Mastodon and Pleroma and a few others but I have not tested those for my use. G+ is a macroblog so I only compared macroblog alternatives.
Alistair Langsford In addition to the information of Shelenn Ayres here is a link to a directory of forums. I'm npt sure if the directory is complete though.
ReplyDeletelibranet.de - Friendica Directory
Shelenn Ayres I haven't tried it but Diaspora* users should be able to join the forum but apparently it's not a very smooth experience.
ReplyDeletegithub.com - friendica
Eric Buijs nice list! beware the search is global not just forums... for example a Progressive Refuge community forum account type will show in a list of 5 results searching the word progressive
ReplyDeleteEric Buijs that is a very old post that doesn't match today's Friendica. Currently, per podmins, their users do not have the capability of joining Friendica community forums. I have not looked any further.
ReplyDeleteEric Buijs FYI a couple of current Diaspora folks tested this today. See my post on Friendica.
ReplyDeleteShelenn Ayres The documention is often an orphan in FLOSS. Great work you're doing on Friendica but does this mean that the whole Github wiki can't be trusted?
ReplyDeleteBTW: I'm already engaged in a number of FLOSS projects and currently have limited time but in the future I'd certainly like to make some additions to Friendica.
Eric Buijs oh i trust the github and know floss is often nt documented well ;) best to refer to the official source project underway at friendi.ca - Contribute – friendica
ReplyDeleteThanks guys. Its making more sense. I’ll just have to play a bit more.
ReplyDelete