We are very happy to announce the availability of the new stable release of Friendica “Interrupted Fern” 2024.12. In addition to several improvements and new features, this release contains the fix for the broken installation wizard.

The highlights of Friendica 2024.12 are

• added exporter for prometheus,
• we dropped the support of OStatus (the predecessor of ActivityPub) after evaluating the amount of active servers/contacts that are still only using this protocol, and deprecated the fancybox addon
• Friendica is now REUSE compliant and supports FEP-67ff

For details, please the CHANGELOG file in the repository.

What is Friendica

Friendica is a decentralised communications platform, you can use to host your own social media server that integrates with independent social networking platforms (like the Fediverse or Diaspora*) but also some commercial ones like Tumblr and BlueSky.

How to Update

Updating from old Friendica versions

If you are updating from an older version than the 2023.12 release, please first update your Friendica instance to that version as it contained some breaking changes.

Pre-Update Procedures

Ensure that the last backup of your Friendica installation was done recently.

Using Git

Updating from the git repositories should only involve a pull from the Friendica core repository and addons repository, regardless of the branch (stable or develop) you are using. Remember to update the dependencies with composer as well. So, assuming that you are on the stable branch, the commands to update your installation to the 2024.12 release would be
cd friendicagit pullbin/composer.phar install --no-devcd addongit pull
If you want to use a different branch than the stable one, you need to fetch and checkout the branch before your perform the git pull.

Pulling in the dependencies with composer will show some deprecation warning, we will be working on that in the upcoming release.

Using the Archive Files

Due to unforseen changes in the CI not possible at the moment.

Post Update Tasks

The database update should be applied automatically, but sometimes it gets stuck. If you encounter this, please initiate the DB update manually from the command line by running the script
bin/console dbstructure update
from the base of your Friendica installation. If the output contains any error message, please let us know using the channels mentioned below.

Please note, that some of the changes to the database structure will take some time to be applied, depending on the size of your Friendica database this update might run for days.

Known Issues

At the time of writing this, none with 2024.12

But the development branch is currently rather unstable and should be used with caution as the development diverged far (for Friendica terms) from the now stable branch. We will let our very valued ALPHA testers when the dev team things that the development branch is stable enough again.

How to Contribute

If you want to contribute to the project, you don’t need to have coding experience. There are a number of tasks listed in the issue tracker with the label “Junior Jobs” we think are good for new contributors. But you are by no means limited to these – if you find a solution to a problem (even a new one) please make a pull request at github or let us know in the development forum.

Contribution to Friendica is also not limited to coding. Any contribution to the documentation, the translation or advertisement materials is welcome or reporting a problem. You don’t need to deal with Git(Hub) or Transifex if you don’t like to. Just get in touch with us and we will get the materials to the appropriate places.

Thanks everyone who helped making this release possible, and especially to all the new contributors to Friendica, and have fun!