- *********
- Friendika
- *********
-
- Distributed Social Network
-
- http://friendika.com
-
-
- Since the dawn of the world-wide-web, the internet has been a battleground
-between the "big boys" with all their resources, and a bunch of upstarts whose
-goal is to topple the status quo - and bring the same powers of global reach
-to anybody with a computer and an internet connection.
-
- The latest battleground is social networking. Many of your friends would
-have you believe that the world (and all the information in it) belongs to
-Facebook.
-
- Friendika is here to rock that boat.
-
- Granted, all your friends aren't here. Yet. The people who made fun of you
-in high school (yet curiously wanted to be friends with you now) are still
-"poking" each other and managing their virtual farms and telling you all about
-their virtual gangwars.
-Would you miss them?
-
- I wouldn't.
-
- You probably have a handful of friends that are truly special. Tell them
-that the world has changed. It's time to move on.
-
- What if there was a social network which provided some of the same
-interaction you've grown to love, *and* was free to use, open source - and
-where your privacy is always under your control?
-
- And what if this social network could scale to encompass the entire
-internet, and *not* require a central organisation to provide servers (in
-exchange for selling your private information to advertisers)?
-
- Look no further.
-
- Friendika is a social network without boundaries, and without ownership.
-Friendika installations can link together into a global social network which
-is free from central control. Besides the Friendika network [which is privacy
-enhanced]; you can also connect with and communicate with friends on identi.ca,
-Status.Net and many other sites and social networks *today*.
-
- Welcome to the federated social web. If you choose not to use Friendika,
-you can choose any of 20-30 other providers of social networking software and
-still be a part of this new social network. This is bigger than Facebook.
-
- Much bigger.
-
- We are currently developing connectors to seamlessly communicate with many
-other open social networks and providers - like Diaspora, GNU-Social,
-OneSocialWeb, and even some of the larger closed services such as Facebook and
-Twitter.
-
- Over the coming months, the boundaries between these networks will start
-to become indistinguishable as they all become part of your social circle.
-
- Our core belief is that your personal thoughts and conversations belong to
-you - and are only meant to be shared with those you wish to share them with.
-
- Period.
-
- Friendika is secure, and as private as you wish it to be. Our privacy
-settings are straight-forward and simple, because we know that relationships
-rarely are (straight-forward and simple). Whether you're communicating with
-drinking buddies or potential employers, you can rest assured that each is
-only able to see the side of you that you wish to present. If you send a
-private message to your aunt Mary, we will encrypt it with military grade
-encryption. We also won't share it with advertisers.
-
- Other distributed social network projects talk about privacy and offering
-a feature-rich social networking alternative, but all they can deliver is
-vapour and vague promises. You've probably heard about the four guys in New
-York and their "Facebook killer". What a disaster that was. Eventually they
-may get it right and release something that actually works (and lets you do
-something besides drag your friends into categories), but they may not.
-What are you going to use in the meantime?
-
- Friendika delivers. We've got an incredibly rich social communications
-interface you can make use of *right now*.
-
- A single instance of Friendika can easily support hundreds of (and up to
-several thousand) people using commodity hosting hardware. Each of these
-people are able to connect with potentially hundreds or thousands of friends
-and associates on any other supported network anywhere in the world and share
-photos, links, status updates, etc.
-
- But maybe you don't want to be connected to the world... That's OK too.
-Friendika may also be closed off from the global community and used to support
-social networking amongst corporate, educational, religious, and other private
-communities. This makes it an excellent choice for the social networking needs
-of young teenagers and especially k-12 organisations.
-
- Every person on Friendika has unlimited profiles available to them. There
-is a "public profile" which can be seen by anybody. Additional profiles may be
-tailored to specific groups or individuals. Try doing that on Twitter.
-
- Groups may be created and used for closed conversations. In this way your
-conversations with one group of friends is completely isolated from other
-friends or groups of friends.
-
- You may also create interactive band/celebrity pages, special interest
-groups, and even organisational 'soapboxes' - for social communications that
-require the ability to scale to global levels. Friendika provides for automatic
-relationship management in these extreme cases so that you can concentrate on
-your message and public persona - and not worry about being swamped by friend
-requests. You can even maintain private social contact with your closest
-friends and public updates to your hordes of fans - using the same interface.
-
- No other social network offers this ability.
-
- Join us.
+ *************
+ * Friendika *
+ *************
+
+ Friendika Communications Server
+
+ http://project.friendika.com
+
+
+ Friendika is a web application for managing social communications. Some
+would call it a "social network" or "distributed social network". We think
+both terms have been over-used, and don't adequately describe Friendika's
+capabilities - though Friendika can also fill those roles.
+
+ At its essence, Friendika is a web application which can monitor various
+information and social activity streams, and which also lets you participate
+in online conversations with friends and associates, using a variety of network
+protocols. These are combined into an overview of your various communications
+and activities - regardless of network origin.
+
+ Friendika also manages your personal profiles and photo albums and lets
+you securely present each of these to specific audiences. Your communications
+can be either open and public, or closed and private. You can easily create
+"groups" of contacts with which you can partition your conversations into
+private social circles, and which cannot be seen outside the circle.
+
+ Friendika is decentralised. Any account on any Friendika server can connect
+with any account on any other Friendika server. You can also connect to and
+interact directly with friends on Facebook, Status.Net, and other federated
+social web services (e.g. identi.ca, GNU-Social, etc.).
+
+ Outgoing communications can be directed to Friendika, existing accounts on
+Facebook and Twitter, federated social web providers - or even delivered to
+email contacts.
+
+ Incoming data streams aren't limited to traditional social networks.
+They may include most any service which provides a syndication feed (both RSS
+and Atom). This allows you to view communications from friends in other
+diverse social networks - such as Diaspora, Google Buzz, and millions of
+blogs, news services, and other websites. You can also import
+contacts from (and write to) anybody that is accessible from your email
+INBOX and view them in your social stream. Over time we will try to
+build two-way bridges to other services so that you can freely
+interact in both directions with anybody on an accessible network that
+allows it.
+
+ Communications between Friendika servers are private and encrypted,
+using military grade encryption - and require mutual identity provenance
+before any data is exchanged. These same crypto mechanisms provide remote
+password-less authentication; allowing you to post to profiles and view private
+photo collections on other servers - without encountering any login and/or
+authorisation dialogues when visiting these sites.
+
+ Friendika has no boundaries and no central ownership of the data generated
+within the network. Anybody with a commodity PHP/MySQL web server or hosting
+account can provide a server, and each individual server can then support
+up to several thousand participating members - each with their own unique
+communication and privacy needs. This allows Friendika to scale to global
+levels and mimics the decentralised architecture of the web itself.
+
+ If you are creating a website which requires social interaction, Friendika
+can also take the place of blog software, forum software and feed readers, and
+also provide individualised communications and content management - or
+simply be used as an alternative to traditional "monolithic" social networks.
+
+ Friendika is also free - in every sense of the word.
+
+ Choose freedom - join us.
+
+ Find out more about the project at http://project.friendika.com
+
+ *******************
+ Friendika Demo Site
+ *******************
+
+ http://demo.friendika.com
+
+ *******************
+ Friendika Downloads
+ *******************
+
+ http://github.com/friendika/friendika/tarball/master
projects / friendica.git / blobdiff