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Friendica
Community2 services
Friendica, the federated social network that bridges to the wider fediverse — your own instance, your own rules — with a dedicated MariaDB database.
Deploy Friendica Free plan, no card.
What you get
- All 2 services provisioned together: friendica, friendica-db
- A community template, not yet verified end to end by the Railyard team
- Automatic HTTPS and zero-downtime deploys
How to deploy Friendica
- 1
Connect a server
Attach a DigitalOcean, Hetzner or Vultr server to Railyard, or any Linux box over SSH.
- 2
Click "Deploy Friendica"
Railyard builds the container and provisions all 2 services.
- 3
Set your domain
Point your domain at the app. Railyard issues an HTTPS certificate and keeps it renewed automatically.
Why deploy on Railyard
Railyard provisions all 2 services in this stack together — friendica, friendica-db — wired to reach each other over the private network, on a server you already pay for.
Deploying Friendica is one piece of a bigger stack you can keep building — add a database, a worker, a cache, or another app, all on the same servers you already pay for.
Good for
- A personal or community fediverse presence that talks to Mastodon, Pixelfed and the rest of ActivityPub
- Running your own small social network without renting space on someone else's instance
Good to know
- FRIENDICA_ADMIN_MAIL is set to a placeholder — whoever registers with that exact email becomes the instance admin; change it before anyone signs up
- Upstream's own reference compose adds a separate cron sidecar container (running /cron.sh from the same image) for background jobs and a redis cache — neither is wired up here yet; Friendica works without them but scheduled jobs (polling remote contacts, deleting expired items) won't run until a release_command or second process is added
- The whole Friendica install, not just uploads, lives on the app's volume (/var/www/html) — matches upstream's own compose, not a smaller app-data-only directory
Frequently asked questions
How much does it cost to self-host Friendica?
Free covers 1 server plus a database server and 3 apps, no card required. Pro is $19/month per team for up to 5 servers and unlimited apps. Team is $49/month per team for unlimited servers. You pay your cloud provider for the server directly; Railyard adds no markup on compute.
What do I need to self-host Friendica?
A server from a provider such as DigitalOcean, Hetzner or Vultr. Railyard provisions all 2 services in this stack together, with HTTPS and your domain configured.
How do I deploy Friendica on my own server?
Connect a server to Railyard, click "Deploy Friendica", and set your domain. Railyard builds the container, wires up the services it needs, and issues an HTTPS certificate automatically.
Can I use my own domain with Friendica?
Yes. Point a DNS record at your server and Railyard issues and renews an HTTPS certificate for it automatically.
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