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?
We tried it and didn’t like the clunky UI.
We also tried Lemmy but it was a bit of a nuisance to maintain.
In the end we settled on a forum with a wiki.
We tried a few forums but in the end Flarum was the nicest, Just a bit of a pain to set the domain to be dynamic but it can be done with some PHP, alternatively, just use a reverse proxy with dnsmasq and wireguard pointing to that DNS.
As for a Wiki We have tried mediawiki, WikiJS And a couple others. I would recommend dokuwiki. (I hear good things about bookstack too).
I’ve tried Flarum in the past, but it really doesn’t handle media well. Just looking on the demo site now, no option to add a video, and to post an image you need to use markdown to add an image URL.
Is that different when it’s not the demo site?
There’s a plugin that does it, FoF or something, and then you can upload an image from your device and it’s pretty good. Some videos play others require downloading after uploading though.
Our family uses a post in flarum for a monthly feed and then moves a few of those images into a dokuwiki page with the gallery plugin.
Oh I should investigate the plugins.
With your family, do you have non-technical and elderly users participating and doing OK with it?
No, I don’t. And that’s going to be one of our big differences here. Everyone in my family is tech literate and knows at least a little bit of programming.
I would strongly suggest dokuwiki. It’s like having a forever Journal of Family affairs and I really like it. I know it’s not quite the social media aesthetic but in my experience I found it to be the thing that stuck.
I would argue against Mediawiki though. It may be more user-friendly for some family members, but the maintenance becomes a nuisance And pulling things out of the database involves half a dozen joins.
Even though dokuwiki editing is text in markup, It’s not a hard concept to grasp and the simplicity makes it feel more tangible which may be appreciated by older family members.
I personally have a Mediawiki set up that my wife and I have used for years, but it’s not something I want to share wider. I haven’t found it hard to maintain, though (I’m using the docker version).
How do you use the Dokuwiki? Do you create a page for each family event with pictures and videos and things? Then other people can go and have a look? What kind of organisation structure do you use? How do others learn that there is a new page to see?
I suppose the problem that I had with Media Wiki is that every update would break extensions. Particularly mathjax and semantic media Wiki. I too amusing it with Docker which helps a lot.
So docuicki has a recent pages view which is really good and lists the user that made the edit. That’s what we use for a feed. There’s also an RSS plug-in that will display other feeds which is kind of nice if you want to discuss other articles.
We create Journal pages that link out to pages for events etc. The events are also linked to from a start page. We display the backlinks using the footer plugin.
Whilst it’s a bit different from social media in that there is no feed, it’s really nice that it provides, like a database of our family’s life in history.
We even have pages for cars and repair logs, computers and updates, everything. The struct plugin is amazing And you can always pop it open in SqliteBrowser too!
I’ve tried a couple of things and I just keep coming back to dokuwiki because it’s the best compromise.
Ah I don’t have that many extensions in Mediawiki so I have probably had a smoother experience that you.
Thanks for describing your wiki setup. Being able to look back at all your events in a sort of giant scrapbook must be awesome. I’m not quite sure it will do the job I’m looking for, but I really like the idea so I think I’ll have a deeper play.
I have non-technical users doesn’t mean it won’t work for us, because I’m sure they can read even if they can’t edit, and that’s mostly what they would be doing with any solution. Looks like there’s also an android app.