Social networks in the enterprise

Contacts

Friendica lets you integrate contacts from other microblogging services in your browser. In this way, you can subscribe to content from Instagram, Twitter, GNU social, Pump.io, Diaspora, and others with the traditional Add New Contact. It should be noted that although contacts can be loaded, this does not enable direct private communication, and the user must have their own account with the source servers.

Forwarding of public messages is also integrated, and users can receive automatic notifications of new messages for subscribed microblogs from external services outside of the Friendica network. After linking, all contacts appear in the Contacts area, regardless of the service used. You can also add RSS feeds, so Friendica also can replace a conventional RSS reader (Figure 4).

Figure 4: Friendica manages contacts in a uniform interface.

Groups

With the help of a group editor, which is accessed through the Contacts page on the left side of the dashboard, admins can add individual contacts to different groups. By default, all contacts are in the Friends group. You create groups by choosing Create New Group and then transfer the individual members to the new group by double-clicking; they remain in the standard group at the same time.

If a user only wants to view the feeds of a specific group, they can click on these feeds in the Network pane of the dashboard on the left. Where all new feeds were previously displayed, only the feeds from members of this group now appear.

Friendica lets you use and manage multiple profiles simultaneously, each with their own avatars. The operator can also show or hide the individual profiles.

Hotot [10] is also available as a desktop client for Friendica and is in the repositories of many distributions. Hotot can also be used with the Identi.ca service and Twitter; the client comes with a firewall and filter settings for unwanted content (Figure 5).

Figure 5: Hotot allows the simultaneous use of different services.

Installing the Server

On the Friendica site, you can download the source code for the server either as a tar.gz or .zip archive from GitHub by clicking on Download. The Resources | Installation item takes you to a short instruction on how to install the server. If the server is to be publicly accessible, you need to register a domain or a subdomain intended for this purpose in advance – as with all microblogging systems.

Friendica's software requirements also include a LAMP stack with an Apache web server, a MySQL database, and support for the PHP scripting language version 5.4 or newer. Alternatively, the Apache server can be replaced by Nginx [11] or Lighttpd [12]. Friendica does not force you to run MySQL as the database, either: You can use MariaDB.

Minimum hardware requirements are not specified by the developers because the platform also runs on virtual servers in the cloud. Friendica provides a quick guide to installing the server and the software requirements in the main window in the Resources menu. More detailed instructions can be found in the archives with the source code.

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