Information Density: Friendica – Signal Evidence & AI Readability

Decentralized architecture with no central authority or ownership.
Relationships can be made across any compatible system, creating a network of Internet scale made up of smaller sites.
Seamless wall-to-wall posts and remote comments, even across different network nodes.

Access lists for every item.
Private conversation groups — on these pages all communications are restricted to group members.
One-to-one private messaging on supported protocols.
Optionally "expire" old content after a certain period of time.
Download your personal data. It all belongs to you.

Built-in support for ActivityPub (e.g. Funkwhale, Hubzilla, Mastodon, Pleroma, Pixelfed), OStatus (e.g. StatusNet, GNU social, Quitter) and diaspora* protocols.
Support for email contacts and communications (two-way) via IMAP4rev1/ESMTP.
Import arbitrary websites and blogs into your social stream via RSS/Atom feeds.
Support for other services via plugins.

We are very happy to announce the availability of the new stable release of Friendica “Blutwurz” 2026.05. In addition to several improvements and new features, this release contains fixes for security problems that Doyensec/Mastodon has notified us about. Thanks for your report! Some highlight of Friendica 2026.05 are For details, please the CHANGELOG file in […]

The development cycle for the 2026.04 release enters the last stage before the stable release – today we have branched off the 2026.04 release candid branch. 2026.04-rc contains all the features of the stable release and is meant to test the new features, find some last rough edges and smooth out the path to the […]

We are very happy to announce the availability of the new stable release of Friendica “Blutwurz” 2026.01. In addition to several improvements and new features, this release contains fixes for security problems that Hrizi Bilel has notified us about. Thanks for your report! It also contains the first results of a accessibility review by Casey […]

We are excited to be part of the 2026 edition of the Social Web Devroom at FOSDEM with a short update on Friendica on Saturday @18:00 CET about what happened in 2025 with Friendica. Should you happen to be in Brussels at the weekend of the 31. Jan / 1. Feb and want to join […]

38c3 with many Fediverse related meet-ups has just finished but we are already looking forward to meet at FOSDEM at the first weekend of February. Tobias from the Friendica devel team will give a talk about Friendica at FOSDEM 25 in the Social Web Devroom. Friendica – under the radar since 2010 is scheduled for […]

We are very happy to announce the availability of the new stable release of Friendica “Interrupted Fern” 2024.12. In addition to several improvements and new features, this release contains the fix for the broken installation wizard. The highlights of Friendica 2024.12 are For details, please see the CHANGELOG file in the repository. What is Friendica […]

The development cycle for the 2024.09 release enters the last stage before the stable release – today we have branched off the 2024.09 release candid branch. 2024.09-rc contains all the features of the stable release and is meant to test the new features, find some last rough edges and smooth out the path to the […]

The Berlin Fediverse Day is a conference about the free social network “Fediverse” organized by members of the Berlin Fediverse get-together at c-base. It is aimed at people interested in alternatives to X, Instagram, Facebook and so on; but also at institutions, universities, media, NGOs, political actors and companies who want to exchange information in […]

We are very happy to announce the availability of the new stable release of Friendica “Yellow Archangel” 2024.08. In addition to several improvements and new features, this release contains several fixes for security issues reported by apexrabbit, Devilx86 and ponlayookm – Thank you for the reports! We strongly recommend all Friendica admins to update their […]

The development cycle for the 2024.06 release enters the last stage before the stable release – today we have branched off the 2024.06 release candid branch. 2024.06-rc contains all the features of the stable release and is meant to test the new features, find some last rough edges and smooth out the path to the […]

We are very happy to announce the availability of the new stable release of Friendica “Blutwurz” 2026.05. In addition to several improvements and new features, this release contains fixes for security problems that Doyensec/Mastodon has notified us about. Thanks for your report!
Some highlight of Friendica 2026.05 are
UI improvements in mainly in the frio theme,
improved several performance issues,
improved support of Bridgy Fed and the ATproto account integration,
we added a new addon to ease the handling of images.
For details, please the CHANGELOG file in the repository. 2026.05-1 fixed a small internal problem with the CI but did not change the functionality of Friendica.
This is the last release of Friendica that works with PHP version lower then 8.2. please upgrade your server environment if you are still using older versions of Friendica.
If you have developed your own addons for Friendica note that we reworked our hook system and introduced a new AddonHelper class.
[H2] What is Friendica
Friendica is a decentralised communications platform, you can use to host your own social media server that integrates with independent social networking platforms (like the Fediverse or Diaspora*) but also some commercial ones like Tumblr and BlueSky.
[H2] How to Update
[H3] Updating from old Friendica versions
If you are updating from an older version than the 2026.01 release, please first update your Friendica instance to that version .
[H3] Pre-Update Procedures
Ensure that the last backup of your Friendica installation was done recently.
[H3] Using Git
Updating from the git repositories should only involve a pull from the Friendica core repository and addons repository, regardless of the branch (stable or develop) you are using. Remember to update the dependencies with composer as well. So, assuming that you are on the stable branch, the commands to update your installation to the 2026.05 release would be
cd friendica
git pull
bin/composer.phar run install:prod
cd addon
git pull
If you want to use a different branch than the stable one, you need to fetch and checkout the branch before your perform the git pull.
Pulling in the dependencies with composer will show some deprecation warning, we will be working on that in the upcoming release.
[H3] Using the Archive Files
If you had downloaded the source files in an archive file (tar.gz) please download the current version of the archive from friendica-full-2026.05.tar.gz (sha256) and friendica-addons 2026.05.tar.gz (sha256)) and unpack it on your local computer.
As many files got deleted or moved around, please upload the unpacked files to a new directory on your server (say friendica_new) and copy over your existing configuration (config/local.config.php and config/addon.config.php) and .htaccess files. Afterwards rename your current Friendica directory (e.g. friendica) to friendica_old and friendica_new to friendica.
The files of the dependencies are included in the archive (make sure you are using the friendica-full-2026.05 archive), so you don’t have to worry about them.
[H3] Post Update Tasks
The database update should be applied automatically, but sometimes it gets stuck. If you encounter this, please initiate the DB update manually from the command line by running the script
bin/console dbstructure update
from the base of your Friendica installation. If the output contains any error message, please let us know using the channels mentioned below.
Please note, that some of the changes to the database structure will take some time to be applied, depending on the size of your Friendica database this update might run for days.
If you are using the daemon for your background worker, note that we have moved the functionality into the console. Adopt your setup to use the new bin/console daemon command.
[H2] Known Issues
At the time of writing this, none with 2026.05
[H2] How to Contribute
If you want to contribute to the project, you don’t need to have coding experience. There are a number of tasks listed in the issue tracker with the label “Junior Jobs” we think are good for new contributors. But you are by no means limited to these – if you find a solution to a problem (even a new one) please make a pull request at github or let us know in the development forum.
Contribution to Friendica is also not limited to coding. Any contribution to the documentation, the translation or advertisement materials is welcome or reporting a problem. You don’t need to deal with Git(Hub) or Transifex if you don’t like to. Just get in touch with us and we will get the materials to the appropriate places.
Thanks everyone who helped making this release possible, and especially to all the new contributors to Friendica, and have fun!
share share share share share share share

[H3] Leave a Reply Cancel reply

This document is intended for a Friendica archive install on a remote GNU/Linux server from a Microsoft Windows desktop computer. You can find additional documentation for more advanced installation instructions on our Resources page  – or our Wiki on Github.
[IMG: welcome to my friend network]
The instructions given in this document are for a personal site hosted on a small VPS (virtual private server). It requires access to the command line on the remote server to enable the background tasks. On the local computer, you’ll need an archive client to extract the friendica archive, an FTP client to transfer the files on the remote server, a text editor and a web browser to access your website.
[H2] What you need before you start
Your hosting solution will need to meet the prerequisites. Please reach out to your hosting support if you are unfamiliar with any or all of these. We are also assuming that your hosting provider gives you a web interface for database creation and management.
[H2] A decision you need to make first
Friendica should be installed in a domain of its own or in a subdomain. A domain would be something like yourself.com, whereas a subdomain might be friendica.yourself.com.  What won’t work very well is a subdirectory install, e.g.: yourself.com/friendica.
Make a decision now, because you are going to have to stick with it. If you choose a full domain, you can skip to the next section of this document already. If you choose a subdomain you will need to discover how to create it. Your hosting provider will almost certainly provide a browser-based routine for this – i.e. a web interface to manage your account. Using this interface, you first create a folder/directory in which to install Friendica, then a subdomain that points to this directory. Example: friendica.yourself.com could point to a directory called friendica on your server.
[H2] Getting the tools you need for installation
If all goes well, we will only be needing one tool for this job: an FTP client used to transfer files from your computer at home to your server. You can download a fairly intuitive free one for use with Windows or OSX. It’s called Cyberduck (which is used for the screen shots in this article) or Filezilla.
If the going gets a little tougher (but not very much), we may also need an application to edit a few lines in a configuration file. We will use WordPad (ships with Windows itself) to edit that file – if any editing is required.
[H2] Getting Friendica
You can download Friendica in two zip (compressed) files. The first contains the core system and can be found here: https://github.com/friendica/friendica/releases. Be sure to grab the archive containing Friendica and the dependencies identified by the full in the filename (e.g. friendica-full-2018.05.tar.gz) and also go for the latest version. If you want to check the integrity of the full archive, you can find the SHA256 check sum here.
You will also be needing the addons – not all of them are optional for what we are doing here. Find them on this page: https://github.com/friendica/friendica-addons/releases and download the archive corresponding to the Friendica version you’re installing.
Now put those two archive files on your Windows desktop and extract them in a folder of your choice.
Then rename the addon folder you now see. It will be called something like friendica-addons-2019.06. Simply call it addon (no s) and put it inside the main Friendica folder you just extracted (there is no need to rename that one).
Additionally, rename .htaccess-dist to .htaccess if you’re using the Apache web server.
[H2] Uploading Friendica
Run your FTP client. We’ll assume you are using Cyberduck. Press the button at the top left to open a connection to the server.  Then enter the details for your account, as received from your provider: Server(probably your own domain name), username and password. Finally, press connect.
[IMG: Setup your FTP client and connect to your server]
If nothing shows up in the main window, try toggling a few of the options given (passive mode, perhaps). If that doesn’t work, try another protocol – FTP-SSL or SFTP. If nothing at all does the trick (very unlikely), please call your hosting provider and ask for help.
Once you are connected to your shared hosting account, either navigate to your web root directory (if you are using a separate domain) or navigate to the directory you created for your subdomain. If you are unsure what your web root directory is, search your provider’s help pages for more information. If even that fails to make things clearer, your provider certainly deserves a phone call.
Then press the Upload button and navigate the next dialog box to the Friendica folder on your desktop – select everything in it and upload. If you are warned that you are overwriting something,  allow it.
[IMG: select all files to upload]
Wait until uploading is finished. Then move on and create a database.
[H2] Creating the database
To create a MySQL database for Friendica, you are going to use the web interface your provider makes available for that purpose.
Since there are various visual (web) routines for database management in use among providers, we can’t tell you exactly how to create a database. We can only predict that it will be straightforward. When you have successfully created that empty database, we will be needing the following details: hostname, username, password, database name. Be sure to write them down or copy them to a text document. Alternatively, you can simply leave the browser window or tab with those details open as you complete the next step.
Here is a example of a database creation panel at Dreamhost:
[IMG: Dreamhost MySQL setup]
[H2] Completing the installation process
Visit your website with a web browser by simply going to the URL you planned for your site. It may take a while to load during this installation run. Then follow the instructions you see in your browser. These instructions will include entering the database details.
If there are any error messages, attempt to follow the advice given. Also go the the Troubleshooting section at the bottom of this document. If your problems persist, use an existing account or join one of our test servers and go to the Friendica Support forum for help or contact us via the mailing list.
If all goes well, on the other hand, installation will end with the creation of your personal account as a user and the admin of your new Friendica site.
[H2] Configure your account basics
You should receive an email with your provisional password. Log on using your nickname (created in the previous step) or email address and that password. Go to Settings and change the provided password to one of your choice. Then visit the Site section of the Admin menu to close registration access to your new site – this is a choice you can revise later. For a small site like the one we are aiming at for group of friends or a family, the best registration policy would be invite-only.
If you are new to Friendica, check out your Help menu for the New User Quick Start, which will walk you through the basics of user-side configuration and the content/contact model.
[H2] Activating scheduled tasks
If you have access to scheduled task (or cron jobs) on your hosting, please add one triggering every 5-10 minutes running the following command:
cd /path/to/friendica; php bin/worker.php
Otherwise, you’ll need to use the command line on your remote server and start the Friendica daemon (background task) using the following command:
cd /path/to/friendica; php bin/daemon.php start
Once started, you can check the daemon status using the following command:
cd /path/to/friendica; php bin/daemon.php status
[H2] Updates
You should follow the blog on this site for announcements of new releases of Friendica. Update instructions are provided in each release announcement.
[H2] Troubleshooting
Two main things might go wrong during installation.
A file called config/local.config.php didn’t get created or wasn’t created properly.The database wasn’t set up properly.
These two things often go hand in hand. In most cases, the installation routine will notice the glitch and continue. At the end, you will be given some configuration code to copy and paste into a file you create and name  local.config.php in the config folder. Then you simply upload that file to your server and the problem is solved.
[H2] Rarer troubleshooting
There is one more thing that can go wrong with in rare cases. It won’t affect installation or cause your site to fail entirely. But if it happens, you will notice huge delays in content exchanges with other sites on the distributed network. If this occurs, find out the correct path to the PHP command line processor from your provider (help files or phone call).
Then download config/local.config.php from your otherwise functioning site. Don’t use the virgin file from that desktop folder any more (the folder should really have been discarded by now anyway).
Find these lines:
return [
...
'config' => [
...
// Location of PHP command line processor
'php_path' => 'php',
Enter the path you have discovered:
return [
...
'config' => [
...
// Location of PHP command line processor
'php_path' => '/path/to/php',
Upload the revised version of config/local.config.php.