Been looking around this place properly today. And it’s honestly looking pretty good right now with some nice theming options too. And considering that I’ve also been giving Bluesky a go, it’s pretty cool that you can even link that account.
Just one though. Unless I’m dumb and I’m missing something, browsing groups doesn’t seem that great at all. Like, unless you know specifically what you want to search for, it looks like your only option is to scroll through posts from groups until you find something that interests or is relevant to you.
I noticed that there’s a directory for users, why not one for groups? Is something like this in the pipeline? I appreciate that a platform like this is a lot more feature heavy and complicated than something like Bluesky or even Lemmy. So I’m not making demands or anything. Just an idea that I think would make it Friendica an even more complete replacement for Facebook.
Personally what I’m looking for out of this is a space where I can crap out my own thoughts and post my stolen memes and shit on my own profile, plus have the community discussion too. On that note, it would also be nice if you could load Lemmy communities in the Friendica interface and ‘Follow’ them in the same manner.
And just for my questions. First, when it comes to your handle or url, what characters exactly are allowed? Because I tried a dash and a dot in my handle and it wouldn’t accept it. Are you really just limited to letters and numbers?
Second question. About the language settings. Is it recommended to also have ‘Undefined’ selected there, in the same way as here? And why do I still see non English posts regardless? (on that note, a translation feature would be nice too)
Edit: Ok as far as languages go, I just found the language filter addon. Somehow missed it on my first round of going through the settings. Will be interesting to see how this works.
I’m not on Friendica yet myself but my understanding is you can subscribe to Lemmy communities as groups from Facebook. You might need to use the !group@server.com notation; I’m not sure how to do it, just that it is possible.
I’ve just noticed now that there are Lemmy communities in the Directory. Going to their ‘profile’ loads a page with that basically just has the description and sidebar contents of the community. And clicking on ‘View Group’ just leads to a ‘Contact not found’ page. So it looks a bit like you can follow / subscribe, but can only see posts from them in your feed and cannot browse the community directly. That’s how it looks to me.
And I wasn’t sure how else to test your suggestion but I made a test post with “!Friendica@lemmy.ca” in the text, which turned into a clickable link that just leads to https://lemmy.ca/c/friendica.