Friendica on one.com or StatusNet on Amazon AWS with Juju

The increasing amount of ads on Facebook, the increased restraints on the Twitter ecosystem and the popularity of the centralized app.net (and the new decentralized protocol solution Tent v0.1 on Hacker News) inspired me to have a look at alternatives. I've tried Diaspora before, but it seemed very unstable - and is progressing very slow.

I've also tried identi.ca, but what I'm after is self hostable distributed social network, like Diaspora.

First attempt: Friendica one.com

Friendica tries to be as simple to install as Wordpress. So I tried to install Friendica on my domain hosted at one.com, but was given a 505 error after uploading. I tried some solutions I found on the web, but gave up after a while.

The switch to Amazon AWS

Next I tried to install StatusNet on an Amazon EC2 instance running Ubuntus by the means of Juju, which should be simple since Ubuntu has written a guide for this exact task. But again I stumbled into several problems.

Firstthe command "Juju Bootstrap" failed because of missing AWS access keys. After Googling I found out where in Amazon they were, and information on how to add them. Then I had trouble with encryption key, but found another guide that helped. Then there was some localization problems when I tried to download the StatusNet charm. I gave up again, and turned back to Friendica on one.com.

Back on One

After some more Googling, I tried to remove the following lines from the .htaccess file:

Options -Indexes
AddType application/x-java-archive .jar
AddType audio/ogg .oga

Finally I saw the install process. On one.com I only have one, shared database - and there aren't and prefixes on Friendica's database tables, witch is both dangerous - and very messy. But i worked. Somewhat.

One.com doesn't support cronjob. But Friendica has two plugins that will solve this. These weren't easy to find. But finally I found them on Github with a guide to installation.

The simplest plugin is the PoorMansCron, but this will make page loading very slow. The second plugin, external cron, requires an external cron service such as setcronjob.com.

Finally I have it up and running. But only for testing. The domain isn't encrypted, so it's unsafe for hosting such things as social networks.

I've also stumbled onto technical problems and structural weaknesses when Friendica tries to communicate with other solutions. Some things just don't work, and it's a bit confusing to use. It's UX/design is very easy to use either, nor is it easy to understand how things are tied together between different services.

I doubt that these are the droids I'm looking for.

The future of social networks aren't here yet.