I've been experimenting with installing and self-hosting several fediverse instances, so I thought I'd post my quick impressions.

Remember that I'm very much not a developer or sysadmin. I'm comfortable in the terminal and can do some slight code tweaking, but that's the extent of my skill set. I'm pretty much your average user in all regards.

Mastodon

Mastodon is the big one, when it comes to the fediverse. It's been featured in quite a few articles over the years as a solid alternative to Twitter and you can find a wide scope of users from every facet of life. There are hundreds upon hundreds of instances that range from tens of thousands of users, to small one-person instances.

Self-hosting is simple as long as you can follow the long and complicated installation, although DigitalOcean does give you the convenience of a one-click install that sets up everything for you. It does require quite a bit of power from your server, so the smaller VPS solutions aren't always going to cut it.

For myself, it was too much effort to try and keep it maintained, especially as it would be an entire instance for just myself.

Pleroma

Pleroma is sleeker and a more cool version of Mastodon, in the sense that it's far more open to hacking and customizing it to your heart's content. It also uses far less resources than Mastodon to run, and it was far simpler to install it.

I did find it far harder to find users to follow, but that could be that the way Pleroma approaches federation is slightly different from Mastodon, so I'm willing to give it some time and see if it sticks.

Hubzilla

Hubzilla is by far the simplest to install. It even works on shared hosting! I've been running my own Hubzilla node for a few weeks now, and I'm constantly learning new things about it. It's far more powerful than I'll ever need, but I'm enjoying tinkering around with it.

I haven't been able to connect with many other users yet, because the directory for connections seems to be flooded with bot accounts and abandoned accounts.

Misskey

Misskey is another micro-blogging network that's similar, and yet very different, from Pleroma and Mastodon. I couldn't come right with the installation and just gave up trying. It does look pretty though.

Movim

Based on the XMPP standard, Movim is centred around sharing articles on Pubsub channels and has chat built in. It's a mash-up of Telegram/WhatsApp/ and Facebook-lite.

I haven't tried hosting this myself, but it's a service I love using and as it's based on XMPP, you can be sure that it's stable and extensible. All you need is a XMPP account, and you're set to go.

WriteFreely

I just installed my own instance of WriteFreely today and as someone who enjoys writing, I fell in love with it immediately. It's very much a stripped down blog system, with the focus being on your words. It's minimalistic, which is exactly what I want when it comes to writing and presenting my work to others out there.

Not only that, but it was relatively simple to set up and should be good for those of you who enjoy writing, both professionally or as a hobby.

Scuttlebutt

Scuttlebutt is the service I've had the least time to dig into. It's an interesting form of an offline Reddit / Facebook network, but that doesn't really do it justice. It can take some time to connect with others, and until you do, your feed will be pretty much empty. It's a good reason to introduce yourself in the #new-people channel and dive into groups that might interest you and connect with people you find interesting.

Conclusion

The fediverse is as strong as ever and there are a multitude of options out there, so it should be easy to find something that suits your taste and use case.

You can self-host and control your data from start to finish, or you can join one of the thousands of available instances out there.

There's definitely no better time than now to try and experiment and find your home in the fediverse.

#scuttlebutt #fediverse #movim #pleroma #writefreely #hubzilla #misskey #mastodon

Happy Free Software Day!

• #gnu - operating system
• #linux - operating system (kernel)
• #debian - operating system
• #neomutt - A console based E-Mail Client
• #xsf - XMPP Standards Foundation
• #profanity - A console based XMPP client
• #movim - Social Media via XMPP
• #gajim - XMPP Client
• #gnupg - Implementation of OpenPGP
• #tmux - terminal multiplexer
• #prosody - XMPP Server
• #ejabberd - XMPP Server
• #jitsi - Video conference
• #i3wm - Windows Manager
• #notmuch - indexing, searching, reading, and tagging email messages
• #FSF / #FSFE Free Software Foundation ( Europe )
• ............

#iloveFS

Thanks for this awesome guide by UbuntuBuzz. With a lot of details and some ideas of improvements for the future. #Movim #review #guide

Movim | Basic Review & Beginner's Guide

by Ade Malsasa Akbar

Movim is a free, beautiful looking, complete communication solution which is like a combination of Facebook, WhatsApp and Blogger. With Movim you can connect to friends, make posts and blog news, create groups, plus voice & video calls -- aside from its Xmpp network. See features it offers and you can expect it can be used for many purposes including online meetings and classrooms. This simple guide exists to help you start Movim. Let's go!

#alternative #beginnersguide #degoogle #freesoftware #instantmessenger #movim #switchfromwhatsapp #videocall #xmpp

If you were wondering if you can use Movim on an iOS device, the easy answer is yes!

To have a little persistence, just open the the domain in Safari, then add to the Home Screen..

Instant Movim app on your iOS device 👍

#movim #ios #apple #webapp

Maybe consider adding something like **Want to post a comment? Sign up to a [Movim pod...](https://api.movim.eu/pods) using your XMPP account!** to the end of you post... so that people seeing the public link version can know how to comment...

Just a thought...

Want to post a comment? Sign up to a Movim pod... using your XMPP account!

It's more than two years ago that I started using the social network #Movim after a tip from an acquaintance. I had left G+ and never wanted to use a centralized social media platform again. I tried the Fediverse (Mastodon and Friendica), Diaspora and Movim but eventually I kept using Movim and Mastodon. The secret of Movim is tranquillity. After logging in for the first time the news stream is empty, much like Diaspora, and it only gets filled with post from people that you follow, communities that you subscribe to and rss feeds. This in combination with an easy to use chat option that gives access to whole #XMPP network makes Movim very powerful.

It's also incredibly easy to create a community in Movim, although I think community isn't the most appropriate description here. It's more a blog from one or more persons where other users can subscribe to, like and comment in a linear fashion.

I recently introduced my wife to Movim and the first thing that surprised her is that, contrary to FB, the news stream contained articles worth reading instead of ads and other bs. She also liked the fact that she could use any XMPP-client for chat. Time will tell if she'll keep using it but her initial enthusiasm was very encouraging. (Less encouraging was that her employee laptop denied access to Movim via Chrome while it was okay to access FB and the likes).

Although, I'm pretty psyched about Movim I would like to see some features. First, coming back to the tranquillity, when in the news stream on the right side five posts of other Movim users appear. I suppose that this is meant for discovery and that's great but in some of the posts I'm less interested but I can't block or hide these posts.

Also there is no way to block or hide a person entirely. This may become a problem since Movim appears to be becoming more and more popular and with that the interaction between people grows exponentially.

Currently I'm lazily using the European server of Movim but I (or anyone else) can deploy a self-hosted instance and I'm tempted to experiment with that. I'll probably get back to that.

Finally, I want to thank Timothée Jaussoin and other contributors for developing Movim and making it available to all of us. It's awesome. And if you read this please consider donating to the Movim project.

Link to my initial thoughts about Movim: https://homehack.nl/movim-floss-alternative-for-hangouts/

Movim es una red social y chat parecida a #Facebook pero #libre, descentralizada, con soporte para comunidades, foros, blogs/páginas, grupos de chats integrados con las salas de #XMPP / #Jabber, stickers, gif animados, bolita verde para saber quien está online, saber quien está escribiendo, reaccionar a los mensajes con cualquier emoji, también puedes encontrar contenido adulto, memes, puedes usar apps como blabber.im para chatear, puente entre tu cuenta de #Movim y #Telegram, #Discord, #Slack, #RocketChat, etc.

Lee el artículo completo aquí: https://writefreely.public.cat//adbenitez/movim-alternativa-a-facebook