Open-source clone or knock-off of popular social platform?

Question

I'm looking for a web application software (stand-alone or Wordpress plug-in) which allows Authors to publish Postings, and provides a Facebook-like experience for both the posting Author and the posting Readers.

The concept of "posting" is similar to the concept of "blogging", so I started by looking at the most popular blogging platform (Wordpress). I find the Author's User Experience a little too cumbersome, epitomized by the whole "administrator interface" concept. I also find that the Reader's User Experience is not as engaging as the popular social platform, as WP's UI seems to be optimized around long wordy articles, rather than short posts with photos.

So, I'm looking for an alternative where posting an article is similar to posting to Facebook, and the posted articles also look similar to Facebook's "News Feed" UX.

Does such an application exist? Or perhaps there is a plug-in for WP?

UPDATE Somebody edited my title and changed it to "super-easy blog webapp". I reverted the edit because I'm not looking for super-easy, I'm looking specifically for a Facebook knock-off, focusing on the Post and News Feed functionality. And it must be open-source.

Answer 1

GNU Social and Pump.io is something you're looking for. Both of them are decentralized and can be hosted on your own web server. GNU Social is also made by Free Software Foundation, which I find extremely neat.

Answer 2

Expanding on @Sir Muffington's answer (posting here an answer because comments are not permanent):

GNU Social

"The FOSS alternative to Twitter" - not a Facebook clone, but close enough. This is the closest answer for what I was looking for.

Pump.io

This seems to be a larger initiative, comprised of a platform and different clients, with an emphasis on Communication Freedom and anti-censorship architecture... some great work but largely misses the mark for my requirement of a simple Facebook knock-off.