Friendica

Is Friendica actively maintained?

Friendica is under active development: 2126 commits landed over the last 11 months, averaging roughly 376 commits a month in the most recent quarter.

Activity is accelerating: the last quarter carried 72% more commits than the one before it.

The most recent tagged release, 2026.05-1, is about 4 months old.

Of the 40 projects we track in Communication - Social Networks and Forums, Friendica ranks #7 by health score — in the top quarter of its category.

What Friendica actually does

Friendica is a decentralised social communication server built with PHP. It allows you to host your own independent social network node, facilitating federated interaction across the wider fediverse. The platform focuses on open standards for public and private messaging.

Best fit: It suits administrators wanting to run an independent federated social network node using standard LAMP-style hosting stacks.

Worth knowing: Federated social platforms typically demand ongoing moderation effort and can accumulate significant storage overhead for media and database records over time.

Deployment notes

You will typically need a standard web server with PHP support, a persistent database backend such as MySQL or PostgreSQL, and a reverse proxy for TLS termination.

Links

• Official website
• Source code