dir/README

    *********
    Friendika
    *********

    Distributed Social Network

    http://friendika.com

	
    Since the dawn of the world-wide-web, the internet has been a battleground
between the "big boys" with all their resources, and a bunch of upstarts whose
goal is to topple the status quo - and bring the same powers of global reach 
to anybody with a computer and an internet connection. 

    The latest battleground is social networking. Many of your friends would 
have you believe that the world (and all the information in it) belongs to 
Facebook. 

    Friendika is here to rock that boat. 

    Granted, all your friends aren't here. Yet. The people who made fun of you
in high school (yet curiously wanted to be friends with you now) are still
"poking" each other and managing their virtual farms and telling you all about
their virtual gangwars. 
Would you miss them? 

    I wouldn't. 

    You probably have a handful of friends that are truly special. Tell them
that the world has changed. It's time to move on. 

    What if there was a social network which provided some of the same
interaction you've grown to love, *and* was free to use, open source - and 
where your privacy is always under your control?
 
    And what if this social network could scale to encompass the entire 
internet, and *not* require a central organisation to provide servers (in 
exchange for selling your private information to advertisers)?

    Look no further. 

    Friendika is a social network without boundaries, and without ownership. 
Friendika installations can link together into a global social network which 
is free from central control. Besides the Friendika network [which is privacy 
enhanced]; you can also connect with and communicate with friends on identi.ca,
Status.Net and many other sites and social networks *today*. 

    Welcome to the federated social web. If you choose not to use Friendika, 
you can choose any of 20-30 other providers of social networking software and
still be a part of this new social network. This is bigger than Facebook. 

    Much bigger.  

    We are currently developing connectors to seamlessly communicate with many 
other open social networks and providers - like Diaspora, GNU-Social,
OneSocialWeb, and even some of the larger closed services such as Facebook and
Twitter.

    Over the coming months, the boundaries between these networks will start
to become indistinguishable as they all become part of your social circle.

   Our core belief is that your personal thoughts and conversations belong to 
you - and are only meant to be shared with those you wish to share them with. 

   Period.  

   Friendika is secure, and as private as you wish it to be. Our privacy 
settings are straight-forward and simple, because we know that relationships 
rarely are (straight-forward and simple). Whether you're communicating with
drinking buddies or potential employers, you can rest assured that each is
only able to see the side of you that you wish to present. If you send a
private message to your aunt Mary, we will encrypt it with military grade
encryption. We also won't share it with advertisers.  

    Other distributed social network projects talk about privacy and offering
a feature-rich social networking alternative, but all they can deliver is 
vapour and vague promises. You've probably heard about the four guys in New
York and their "Facebook killer". What a disaster that was. Eventually they
may get it right and release something that actually works (and lets you do 
something besides drag your friends into categories), but they may not.
What are you going to use in the meantime?   

    Friendika delivers. We've got an incredibly rich social communications 
interface you can make use of *right now*. 
   
    A single instance of Friendika can easily support hundreds of (and up to
several thousand) people using commodity hosting hardware. Each of these 
people are able to connect with potentially hundreds or thousands of friends 
and associates on any other supported network anywhere in the world and share 
photos, links, status updates, etc. 

    But maybe you don't want to be connected to the world... That's OK too. 
Friendika may also be closed off from the global community and used to support
social networking amongst corporate, educational, religious, and other private
communities. This makes it an excellent choice for the social networking needs
of young teenagers and especially k-12 organisations. 

    Every person on Friendika has unlimited profiles available to them. There
is a "public profile" which can be seen by anybody. Additional profiles may be 
tailored to specific groups or individuals. Try doing that on Twitter.

    Groups may be created and used for closed conversations. In this way your 
conversations with one group of friends is completely isolated from other 
friends or groups of friends.

    You may also create interactive band/celebrity pages, special interest
groups, and even organisational 'soapboxes' - for social communications that
require the ability to scale to global levels. Friendika provides for automatic
relationship management in these extreme cases so that you can concentrate on
your message and public persona - and not worry about being swamped by friend
requests. You can even maintain private social contact with your closest 
friends and public updates to your hordes of fans - using the same interface.

    No other social network offers this ability.  

	Join us.