If you’re familiar in any capacity with self hosted tech. Id suggest checking out matrix servers. I setup one for family and friends a few months back. Currently it’s only running on a 2 core 8 gig ram vps with around 15 regular users, and ticks over fine. It’s routinely used as a phone chat client like WhatsApp, as well as for voice channels instead of discord.

You can utilise multiple different clients; but I would suggest element, as they’re the closest to WhatsApp, and therefore the easiest for people to adopt. (Afaik, it’s the only matrix client with voice & video call support too).

Matrix servers run on the concept of decentralised federated servers, with the idea that as the technology expands, admins can federate with other matrix servers and allow cross communication (in much the same way the fediverse works).

Good old fashioned tribalism.

Are there any fediversians out there familiar with friendica? From what I can tell, it looks like a FOSS equivalent to Facebook. I was never really into Facebook or Instagram, so on the surface it seems to tick the boxes, but I appreciate they have addiction tier levels of interaction with the majority of people around me, so differences will be glaring for hardcore users.

My partner is an artist, and she’s been trialling pixelfed for me; all seems to be going smoothly, but the older generations are FB diehards, so if I have any chance of adoption, it has to be something closer to that experience.

I’m looking to potentially spin up an instance for friends and family to migrate to. They currently have the desire due to the stream of enshittification we’re seeing; but people are fickle and I’ve no doubt that desire can be extinguished by the slightest inconvenience. so any insight on what’s good and what’s missing regarding friendica (or other FB FOSS alternatives), is definitely appreciated.

DDG has a mobile browser that you can download, so it’s likely a push notification via their browser rather than an actual notification from them directly.

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