Friendica bot

What is Friendica?

Friendica is a decentralized social networking platform that's part of the Fediverse, a network of interconnected servers running compatible software for social networking. It allows users to connect and communicate across different platforms and servers. Friendica is developed by an open-source community and is freely available at friendi.ca. The project maintains comprehensive documentation on their wiki.

Friendica operates as a federated social network service that can connect with other platforms in the Fediverse using various protocols. When Friendica accesses websites, it typically identifies itself with a user-agent string containing Friendica followed by version information, such as Friendica/x.x.x.

A distinctive characteristic of Friendica is its ability to connect with multiple social networks and protocols, including ActivityPub, Diaspora, and others, making it highly interoperable within the decentralized social web ecosystem.

Why is Friendica crawling my site?

Friendica may be accessing your site for several legitimate reasons. Most commonly, it's retrieving content that a Friendica user has linked to or is trying to interact with. This could include:

1. Fetching link previews when a user shares your content
2. Retrieving images or media from your site that was referenced in a post
3. Verifying homepage ownership as part of Friendica's verification process
4. Accessing RSS feeds if a Friendica bot is configured to publish your content

The frequency of these visits depends on how often Friendica users interact with your content. A popular link shared across the Friendica network might result in multiple crawl requests as different instances access the content.

What is the purpose of Friendica?

Friendica serves as a decentralized social networking platform that empowers users to communicate across various federated networks. When it accesses your site, it's typically supporting features that enhance social sharing and communication.

The primary purposes include:

1. Enabling rich content sharing by fetching metadata, images, and previews of shared links
2. Supporting RSS feed integration for content syndication
3. Verifying website ownership claims by users
4. Facilitating cross-platform communication within the broader Fediverse

For website owners, Friendica's crawling generally provides the benefit of increased visibility and distribution of your content across decentralized networks. Your content can reach audiences who prefer privacy-focused, decentralized platforms rather than mainstream social media.

How do I block Friendica?

Friendica generally respects standard robots.txt directives. If you wish to block Friendica's access to your site, you can add the following to your robots.txt file:

User-agent: Friendica
Disallow: /

This will instruct Friendica bots to avoid crawling your entire site. If you want to block only specific sections, you can replace the "/" with the path you want to restrict.

For more granular control, you may also consider blocking specific Friendica instances by their IP addresses through your server configuration if particular instances are causing issues.

Keep in mind that blocking Friendica may reduce the visibility of your content across the Fediverse, potentially limiting your reach to users of decentralized social networks. If Friendica is accessing your site because users are sharing your content, blocking it might prevent proper link previews and reduce engagement with your material in these communities.

If you're experiencing excessive crawling from Friendica instances, consider reaching out to the administrators of those specific instances, as they may be able to adjust their crawler settings. The Friendica community maintains communication channels including support forums accessible from their main website.