Using Friendica with Groups or Forums as an alternative to Google+
I was hoping to use my Drupal website and blog as an RSS feed to my other networks but Drupal is quite complex (powerful?) in setting up Views and Feeds. Although it all basically works and I do have an RSS feed running it does not include images I have added to my posts. Of course, this is something that works well with WordPress but let me say no more on that…
Friendica, as a macroblog (ie. unlike microblogs such as Twitter or Mastodon), is probably the most powerful and most connected out of them all. It can import from Twitter, G+, and others and also export to many networks.
But one concept to grasp is that it does not have groups/forums linked under your Profile. Everything is a separate Profile. So you create a Profile and set is as a personal, forum, or whatever type and then give it attributes. This is quite powerful as you can also set each one to mirror (import) posts from a different source. So I created a separate Forum on Friendica called Gadgeteerza for my tech posts. It imports from an RSS feed (I'm testing out Blogger for this right now as I need a good quality RSS feed as a source). The forum can be found at https://libranet.de/profile/gadgeteerza and is separate from my personal profile. I see on your personal profile you can actually also create "additional profiles" and then switch between them so that may be another way of doing it.
So I can create posts in two ways:
1. I added a new contact to that forum and gave the RSS feed as its address. Then I set that contact to "mirror" posts to my feed. One note here, not all instances of Friendica allow you to add and mirror contacts as RSS feeds and this is why it did not work on my personal profile instance.
2. From my personal profile, I can create a post and just mention the name of the forum with an exclamation in front (eg. !gadgeteerza) and that pushes the post to the forum. But in this way it posts as my personal profiler and not as the Forum.
And a bonus is that any Profile on Friendica will also have a RSS feed created from posts using the format basic-url.com//feed/[nickname]/posts for the feed URL
So yes I may also use Friendica as my source to create posts. It all depends on how well I can make it gel together.
