friendica/README

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    Friendika
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    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 gang wars. Would you miss them? 

    I wouldn't. 

    You probably have a handful of friends that are truly special. Tell those
friends that the world has changed - because it has. It's time to move on. A 
year ago, if you had left Facebook, there was no place to go - at least a 
place which offered the same kind of social interaction (and wasn't just
another huge company trying to make money off of all of your private
information).

    Today you have options.  

    What if there was a social network which provided some of the same
interaction you've grown to love, *and* was free to use, *and* was 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 peddling your private information behind your back.)

    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 
(though we think you'd be foolish not to), you can choose any of 20-30 other
providers of federated social networking software and still be a part of this
vast new social network. This is going to be 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.

    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. Things like "Private mail will be in the next
release". 

    Friendika delivers. We've got an incredibly rich social communications 
interface you can make use of *right now*.

    And lest you think we're just trying to copy Facebook feature-for-feature,
you couldn't be further from the truth. We like the conversational style
because it feels natural, and that's why Facebook grew to be what it is today. 
But we're creating something completely different. 

    Something better.

    A single instance of Friendika can easily support hundreds of (and up to
several thousand) people using commodity hosting hardware. You could even run
Friendika on an old PC in your closet or garage. 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... and that's OK 
too. Friendika may 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.

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    Friendika Demo Site
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    http://demo.friendika.com

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    Friendika Downloads
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    http://github.com/friendika/friendika/tarball/master