Over time I’ve been on the lookout for social media for family to use. I haven’t really found anything suitable, key thing is that posting photos and videos needs to be user friendly. For example, Friendica all but requiring you to upload your video to YouTube and post the embedded video is just not gonna fly.
I’ve seen Zusam in the past, which looks like it could become something but I don’t think it’s ready for me to try to get extended family into. (It’s worth mentioning here that certain extended family have shown interest in using something like this)
Recently I’ve had a look around at some Enterprise social solutions, and have had a play with HumHub. It has a much more familiar look, things are separated into spaces that are similar to Facebook groups, and while media uploads aren’t perfect I think they will work well enough.
HumHub has modules, many of which cost a decent amount of money, because they target the enterprise market. However, the community version is open source and the base features and free modules seem to work well.
Does anyone have experience using it? Any warnings I should know about? Any similar software that does a better job?
Do you want this social media to be for your family to use only with family members or for them to use with family and beyond?
Revolt could be good as a local family group chat if you like the discord style. You’ve probably already tried it but Pixelfed/mastodon/misskey sound like the easiest to get family on board with and seem like they would be good family social media platforms IMO.
In my experience none of the federated platforms handle video well, especially the facebook like platforms. They are built around things being public, and expect you to upload to youtube or some other video site in order to post a video. If they let you upload videos at all, it’s as an attachment. Admittedly HumHub is a bit like that, but it’s not too janky from a user experience perspective.
One thing I liked about Zusam is the automatic resizing of videos to make them reasonably sized. If I record a 2 minute video, it can be 300 or 400MB. Zusam can be configured to resize the video to a set maximum size in order to make it more reasonable for people watching. HumHub doesn’t do this, but I have wondered if I could use a cron job and ffmpeg to do it.
I haven’t decided yet. Initially we’d start with people who know our kids. But if some of those people wanted to set up a page for their own kids, they wouldn’t want some of the people on our page who they don’t know. And they might want people on their page that don’t know our kids. So then all the HubHub privacy settings come in handy where people can create a space and control who can see what.
I don’t really think that’s something that will be familiar enough to people, especially grant parents and other family of that generation. And I don’t think a group chat is what I’m after, self hosting a group chat doesn’t seem to have many advantages over say a Signal group chat.
These are generally public, and even if you have it set up as a private instance with no federation then it still feels like a shouting at the void kind of platform. None of the family I have in mind use twitter or mastodon, but everyone uses facebook. So I’m aiming for that sort of a feel. But IMO Friendica is not something I feel is good enough yet from a user experience point of view, the same with Diaspora*.
I could never get mastodon to work with an app without using SSL.
I much prefer setting up a VPN and reverse proxy without having to deal with SSL. So it was really annoying not being able to use an app on the phone to connect to it.