Credits go to @kmh for creating this style. It comes in both a light and dark version (check the links for usage instructions).
If you don’t want to fiddle with code and stuff, loma.ml has already installed it server-wide*, and should be available straight away for new accounts (If not, go to Settings>Display>General Theme Settings and change it from there. Or follow the guide in any of the links above).
Edit: loma seems to require invites. But, while in german, joinfriendica.de allows you to join without an invite. It also has quite a bunch of add-ons too like bluesky, tumblr, ifttt, markdown, langfilter (filters the languages in posts/comments) and curweather (shows the current weather).
Google+ was better. The concept of “circles” being the primary way of interacting with people was ingenious and far better represents how real people interact. My fencing friends are not the same as my RPG friends who are not the same as my family.
Facebook adopted this with “lists”, but they’re not treated as the core part of the experience that G+'s Circles were, so they don’t get used.
I’ve put everyone on a list but there have been times Facebook has made it hard to even post only for that list
Damn. I can’t imagine having enough people in my life to make lists.
There’s something wrong with me though. I’ve spent most of my life alone and my biggest fear has always been centered around being asked to leave my space.
Of course when you get older that gets harder. I’m lucky at the moment. I’m a stay at home dad who goes to spend time working on various projects with my uncle when I’m free.
If he died tonight I’d have no social life at all.
Some of the lists are very small. It was very much inspired by Google+ and I did it so I could easily post things relevant only to certain groups that might not be relevant to others or that I wouldn’t want others to see.
I suppose I do have a lot of “friends” on Facebook, but I’ve also been on the platform for 20 years as of this month or next. I joined back when it was less than a year old and you had to be a university student, and back then you had to be at a university that was supported by the platform. You could list what dorm you were in and your class schedule, which made it easy to find other students in your class, helpful if you’d missed a class or something. It was actually really useful in an era when college classes were just starting to make more use of online tools. In that era it made sense to add a lot of people.
I’ve purged the list a few times, and I could probably go through it again. The vast majority I haven’t seen in years, and there are plenty I’d probably never spend time with socially. Very few are probably truly “friends” in a deep sense of the word. On the other hand, there have been a few times I’ve looked to see what somebody was up to and discovered they’d deleted me, which was occasionally disappointing. Of course, I’m also not really on there anymore like I used to be, so it might not even matter.
I don’t know how much I’d say something’s really wrong with you. It’s hard to me to say having no friends is better or worse than someone who has hundreds or thousands of “friends.” I think it’s hard to have more than a handful of real friends. It’s also hard as a parent to have time for other friends.
I hope your uncle gets to enjoy a long life in good health, and you’re able to branch out your circle even just a little.