Do you need an alternative? Less time behind a screen does wonders for mental health.
this post was submitted on 22 Jan 2026
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I totally agree, but people are addicted. And they want to keep in touch which is understandable. Id rather give them an alternative because they will go back to corpo net the second anytbing gets too hard.
That’s a journey the individual must take on their own. That’s the challenge of addiction. The reason people come back FB isn’t their friends and family. It’s the incredible force of dark patterns that convince them they are missing out on the world without it.
Since joining Lemmy, I haven’t felt the same pull to browse for hours on end. I usually get about 10-15 minutes in, get bored, and go do something else. Even Reddit would keep me hooked for hours.
With an algorithm purpose-built to drip-feed an endless cycle of dopamine and shock, it takes a few days or even weeks to get used to the slower cycle of information. Our brains want more information all the time, and they use this to their advantage.
On the note of trying to convince someone anyway, focus on the fact that the Fediverse does none of this and that there is no profit incentive behind the platform, meaning they have no incentive to make you feel worse in exchange for more ads.
For a direct, but still early Fediverse replacement, maybe consider Friendica.
I totally agree and I wish people understood that. But many are just like animals hooked on TikTok shorts and endless slop content and its the "norm".
A big reason I am on fb still is for community events and band stuff. There is no other place for that sort of thing. If you dont post on fb, no one is coming to your show/event.
Texting, emailing and calling all help you stay in touch and don't involve Fuckerberg or his shitty software.
I just straight up abandoned Facebook a decade ago and haven't looked back. I keep up with the friends that bother to put in the effort, and acquaintances that don't weren't super important anyway.
Where is a similar place?
Hell.
Or Minneapolis
Not using Facebook or similar is better for your health and time you don't need a replacement unless you use the marketplace to sell or buy you can always make a new account just for that.
Oh ya im pretty huge on marketplace unfortunately too..and for events and band gigs
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Phone numbers still works
(if encryption isn't a requirement)
Start your own, see what you like first and then invite friends.
Its a lot easier to wrangel the tech illiterate friends when they know you have skin in the game. Instead of " hey lets all join this other social network" go for "im starting my own social network and id love if you would join.
Friendica is probably the closest to facebook.
Personally i really like pleroma and have been running it for about a year now, after having previously tried misskey and some others.
Sometimes I feel I should and could do this, be a place for my community to have an uncentralized social place..but it would take a lot of time and energy and if I mess up it'll scare everyone away from the fediverse for good..
Its less time and energy then you might think, especially if its for a smaller group without open sign-ups. You could use a service like https://fedihost.co/ that takes most of the difficulty out of it setting up.
Even if you do use someone else's instance they can always end up calling it quits for one reason or another (even the big ones). Fediverse works best and stays healthy the more decentralized it is.
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Friendica is the fed Facebook.
I run a humhub instance. It is very similar to fb from years ago. I cannot get anyone to use it though, just me posting for myself. I kinda use it a journal now, with pics and short paragraph or two about what I've been up to.
For group messages, I had a hard time getting people to move off of fb messenger. Tried good old text messaging, but everyone has iphones and can't figure out the difference between I message and text. Also a few of them don't even have a cell #, so they just can't text.
I was successful in getting most of everyone over to signal, and I created accounts for my sister and her kids that don't have phone #'s.
I use kijiji here in Canada, instead of marketplace. It had higher quality buyers and sellers anyway. Less annoying people.
Since you very likely did the research, what brought you to Humhub instead of Friendica?
Oh, uhhh, honestly I don't remember exactly! I started setting up Friendica, and I ran into something that confused me, or it didn't work correctly after setup. Tried Humhub, and it just worked, so started using it and didn't look back.
That absolutely makes sense. Friendica isn't exactly the friendliest to get going.
You're here. For me this has been a good replacement for whatever I was earlier using Facebook for.
What is there on Facebook that PieFed or Lemmy don't cover?
Well to me lemmy is more like an anonymous forum. I don't have friends or family on here.
Do you have them on Facebook, then?
I kind of do, but Facebook hasn't shown me anything from them in years. Makes their being there largely irrelevant.
Yes, all of my friends post on fb and have for the past 12 years or more. Family uses it a lot.
It must be more popular in my area or something. There's no age difference either, people from 17 to 70 are using it.
Yeah, for what I know I my family used to post a lot there as well. Facebook just mostly stopped showing any content from them some years ago. But when nothing really comes out of it, they don't bother. They post something, I see some commercial content instead.
I post something, they see some commercial content instead.
I'm a bit surprised to hear Facebook works for some people like it worked a decade ago!
But also, Finnish culture is very different from US culture in how we talk and when, so maybe the algorithm just doesn't recognize the Finnish kind of engagement and considers us utterly uninterested in each other? Or maybe I've just been lucky and FB had been hiccuping? Dunno, there's no meaningful difference between PieFed and the little of what FB fed me that was not crud.
Ah I see. I make sure to go in and disable all ads and check all my privacy settings every so often so I dont get fed the slop. And I dont engage with it which helps. They track how long you even pause your scrolling to track what you look at. Its gross.
Outside getting people to join a fedi platform, Matrix instance, or Signal, all a non-trivial ask, you could see if they're on Discord or WhatsApp already, which while neither is great at least its a step away. You could do a simple SMS group, if you are okay with the privacy risks - almost everyone still had a phone number.
Post mail surprisingly is still a thing too if you are okay with delayed messages and there being cost.
Honestly, I miss e-Groups/YahooGroups.
I had 4 listservs with hundreds of subscribers on my main art group.
I've been off Facebook for over a decade now but have been unable to leave the META ecosystem due to the ubiquity of WhatsApp in the UK. There's not really a good alternative in terms of IM apps because the other popular ones seem to have made a USP out of appealing to criminals.
Why do you want a replacement if you're trying to leave?
Isn't it obvious? I still want a place to connect for events and to talk with friends/family and not have to use fb.
for marketplace the largest competitor is Craigslist, but there are more alternatives.
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there's no equivalent that has all those people in it. maybe instagram or twitter but it's not any better obviously :(
I always thought (admittedly, without any objective data points to back me up) that say, a baboon's taint would be a similar, but better place than fb.
Friendica will be the closest, and from my experience Hubzilla is similar enough. I've used Friendica extensively (see: @klymilark@coypu.fallcounty.omg.lol), and I've toyed with Hubzilla a bit. Friendica is less complicated in a user-facing way, and Hubzilla doesn't hide its features.
What is friendica like without the network effect of real people? Or are you connected to IRL friends on there?
I have some IRL friends there, but not many. Most of them are people I met through the fediverse. I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "Without the network effect of real people" though?
The network effect is the phenomenon of "all of my friends are on Facebook, I better join Facebook," or "all my follows are moving to Bluesky, I better move to Bluesky".
Here is how Cory Doctorow explains it:
A service has "network effects" if it gets more valuable as users join it. You joined Twitter to talk to the people who were already using it, and then other people joined so they could talk to you.
I think I get it (I hope)? I've had a rough couple days sleep and amn't firing on all cylinders, apologies xD
From the personal side: I don't really notice it much, because I've never really used social media to keep up with people. Facebook was the one I had the most IRL connections on, and I only used it to talk to 5 or 6 people, never for the social media features. It is harder to keep myself on Friendica, and not let it sit idle though. Admittedly it may well just turn into mostly me auto-posting from my blog's RSS feed, and checking replies occasionally at some point, but I do still check it pretty regularly.
Getting people to switch: I gave up on that before I even started, especially with Friendica. I could probably convince one of my friends to join Lemmy since it's pretty easy to say "Search lemmyverse.net, copy the community name, paste it" than however you're supposed to find people on low-pop traditional activity pub styled servers. Plus I am the techiest person I know by a long shot, and while you don't need to be techie to be on fedi... A lot of us are, so it's hard to find people who aren't talking about it as most of what they post.
From the platform's perspective: Honestly it's getting better on the whole. It's not that different to any other apub server, except in that it has more protocols built in (apub, zot, dfrn, and diaspora, plus you can directly follow RSS feeds if you want), and there are a lot of connectors to socials like Tumblr, and even Facebook from what I saw. There's people here! It's just convincing people that's hard.
Sorry if this didn't actually answer the question, I did my best with a very soupy brain xD Feel free to ask any questions though!
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