Every Friendica instance I tried had issues with extremely slow performance and complete nonresponsiveness.
I even tried Friendica.world because Ruud knows what he is doing, but it ran pretty bad too.
Comment on Friendica's marketing is terrible.
MxRemy@piefed.social 3 days ago
While i definitely agree, none of this is a deal breaker for me. What is a deal breaker is this: I am on my third Friendica account now because the first 2 instances both started struggling and then collapsed. The one I'm on now is suddenly running very slow, just like the first 2 before the end. It seems to me like maybe they're kinda hard to run?
End0fLine@midwest.social 3 days ago
ruud@piefed.world 3 days ago
Thank you, and yes, Friendica.World is still having issues.
I even created a separate community for it: https://lemmy.world/c/friendicaworldFredselfish@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Yeah just signed up, and tried to share it with friends and so far I got no friends or whatever I am suppose to get.
Jerry@feddit.online 3 days ago
The stalls are because the database queries are suboptimal. There is one that occasionally runs that, on my instance (I have 337 active users), can sometimes run for 15 minutes and will lock tables. Everything stalls and backs up.
This query was discussed, and I believe in the next release (but unsure) it will be replaced. Instead of using a ton of "not in" clauses, it does a left join now. In testing, someone mentioned it went from multi minutes to multi seconds to run. But there are a lot more such queries.
I think what Friendica needs desperately is a MariaDB/MySql expert to clean up the queries.
Because Friendica supports groups, you can connect to Lemmy communities. This is what kills Freindica. It just cannot handle the hundreds of thousands of daily connections that come in just from lemmy.world alone. Basically, it then becomes a Lemmy/Piefed/MBIN instance plus a Mastodon instance. The database grows by leaps and bounces, queues back up, and it stalls. CPU pegs without relief.
On mine, I finally had to block the Lemmy User Agent at the Cloudflare firewall. I calculated I would have had to spend another $500/month to allow the server to handle the Lemmy traffic comfortably, excluding the continuing cost for DB space. So far, I haven't blocked Piefed and MBIN, but this could change.
Friendica groups were designed for small private groups or specialized groups. Not public forums. I don't think they ever anticipated someone connecting to Lemmy.world communities and that such groups would become so active. I've told people on my instance that if they want to connect to these groups, they should do them using Piefed/Lemmy/Mbin, not Friendica.
kudra@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
Thanks for this comment! It really explains exactly why Friendica is struggling.
Is a real shame as IMO events (and groups) are really important to get a critical mass of adoption in Fedi. I look at sites like Allevents.in which allow people to submit but most of their event data is scraped from FB. We need Fedi instances which make searching events easy. So many groups and individuals and organisations feel unable to leave FB because they can’t see anywhere else to tell people about events, at the moment that is pretty true. But it needs to be an allrounder site, not an event specialist site.
But not being able to connect to busy Lemmy communities would mean Friendica isn’t an ideal allrounder, and even if the Friendica instance got big and has very busy groups, it would have issues.
I hope that these issues get solved!
rglullis@communick.news 3 days ago
(just a placeholder for my usual rant about how federation is the wrong unit for scaling social media)
dil@lemmy.zip 3 days ago
Isk if it was friendica or lemmy but the space filled up hella fast, friendica needed constant restarts like once a week, ideally daily, or it lagged and you couldn’t login or do anything.
korendian@lemmy.world 3 days ago
You’re the third person I’ve heard this from. Seems marketing is not the only issue.