First Steps

Once you have installed Friendica successfully on your server, you might consider some customizations to make the experience better.

Finding interesting contacts in a new social network like the Fediverse can be hard. To get potentially interesting content onto your Friendica node without subscribing to random people on different node of the Fediverse, you can subscribe your node to a relay service. These relay services take all public postings from subscribed nodes and pass them forward to all other subscribed nodes. See this overview page at the-federation.info for a list of available relay servers.

To subscribe your node to one (or more) relays, you need to use the command line configuration tool that comes with Friendica. So log-in to your server via ssh and navigate to the base of your Friendica installation. Then run the following command.

bin/console relay add https://relay.example.com/actor

Afterwards this relay will be listed on the “Site configuration” page of the admin panel of your node. Here you then can select the scope of the subscription, that is whether you want to import all postings or only those with matching hash tags used. In addition to the tags you enter to the Friendica node wide configuration, you can also opt to include the tags from your users profiles to be imported.

Postings imported from the relay will be shown at the global community page of your node. So make sure, that the community page is enabled at least to the users of your Friendica node.

When you access your freshly installed Friendica instance, you will see only the login form on the landing page. If you want to customize the contents of this page, you can create a simple file called home.html in the base of your Friendica installation. This file contains the HTML contents shown aside of the form.

If you want to, you can use CSS to style the elements of the landing page. To do so, put the CSS code you want to have applied in a file called home.css alongside the home.html file.

If you want to run your Friendica instance for a broader audience then just you and your family, you can provide information about how to contact the admin, who the admin of the node is and the rules of the instance using the Impressum addon and the Terms of Service settings in the admin panel.

The Impressum addon adds an imprint section to the general information page of your instance. With is you can add information about how to contact the admin of the node and add a footer which will be displayed on all pages generated by Friendica. The information can be formatted using BBCode, so you can provide links to pages with further information.

If you activate the Terms of Service they will be shown on the registration page of your Friendica instance and on a separate page. You have to write the Terms of Service that apply for your Friendica instance yourself, formatting the text using BBCode. In addition you can activate the display of a generic data protection information. This note contains general information about what private data of users is needed by Friendica and how users can export their data.