Friendica bot

Friendica is an open-source, decentralized social networking platform that is part of the Fediverse, a network of interconnected social servers. It allows users to connect and communicate across different platforms. When Friendica interacts with external websites, it acts as a fetcher, identifying itself with a user-agent string containing Friendica. A key characteristic of Friendica is its interoperability; it can connect with multiple social networking protocols, including ActivityPub and Diaspora, making it a highly connected part of the decentralized web.

A Friendica bot is likely accessing your website because a user on the Friendica network has interacted with your content. Common reasons include a user sharing a link to your site, which triggers the bot to fetch a preview; a user referencing an image or media file hosted on your site; or a bot configured to publish your RSS feed content to the network. The frequency of visits depends on how often users on the Friendica network engage with your content.

The Friendica bot's purpose is to support the social sharing and communication features of the decentralized Friendica platform. It enables rich content sharing by fetching metadata and media for link previews, supports content syndication through RSS feed integration, and facilitates other interactions within the Fediverse. For website owners, this activity can be beneficial, increasing the visibility and distribution of your content across decentralized, privacy-focused social networks.

To prevent the Friendica bot from accessing your website, you can add a disallow rule to your robots.txt file. This will instruct the bot not to visit your pages.

Add the following lines to your robots.txt file to block Friendica:

User-agent: Friendica
Disallow: /