Cross-posting some things I wrote on Mastodon when I first tried out Friendica on October 16, 2023:

Quick report on my first foray into Friendica. It definitely has some things going for it, but I'm not sure how I feel, on balance.

Good:
* Comment threads are indented the way I want, which is nice
* Being able to follow RSS feeds is pretty cool
* You can assign your contacts to "groups" and use the groups as both feed filters and as visibility filters for your posts

Neutral (?):
* It's done a pretty good job of replicating the Facebook vibe, for better or worse
* As on Facebook, the feed is organized into discrete comment threads
* Quote-sharing is a thing (your mileage may vary)

Bad:
* As on Facebook (I think?) there's a big red notification dot with a number telling you how many new posts there are on your feed
* There doesn't seem to be a way to set up said big red notification dot to only show the number of posts on a preferred filter
* There doesn't seem to be a way to filter boosts out of your feed (either for individual users or for the entire feed)
* The interface is more laggy than Mastodon

Uh... interesting?:
* There is a dislike button

Overall, I'm not sure how I feel. Currently, Mastodon is more comfortable for me, but Mastodon has also been my primary social media for a long time now, and it's been a long time since I was on Facebook with any regularity.

The red "you've got mail" dot whenever there are new posts in my feed really bothers me. I don't want to be nudged to continually engage. I do think Mastodon has its own nudges built in, though, so it's hard to compare them.

I do very much like that the feed is organized into conversations rather than as an unsorted stream of contextless comments. I feel like this interface style encourages people to engage with one another socially, rather than to respond to things out of context.

In a weird way, I wonder a little bit about whether that irritating red dot might be useful in the end, in that it might encourage me to prune back my follows list. Unfortunately, I think the time regained by said pruning would easily be offset by my apparent lack of control over whether or not I can see other people's boosts.

Overall, I suspect that Friendica will tend toward being more of a time sink than Mastodon.

Despite (or perhaps because of) the resemblance to Facebook, the interface is kind of overwhelming. There are a *lot* of configuration controls, and site navigation is challenging in a similar way to Dreamwidth

There seems to be only one screen on which the button for composing new messages is visible, which seems not-ideal.

Final point for now: the beautifully indented threads used by Dreamwidth, Euphoria, and Friendica, and others are based on a fundamentally different thread concept from Twitter and Mastodon. In the former case, tree-like threads work great and linear threads are silly. In the latter, linear threads are the way to go and tree-like threads are hard to navigate. Problems emerge when federating an option A interface with an option B interface. But federate we will.

So overall, I think my impressions are mixed. It'll be interesting to see how I feel after I've had some time to process all this.

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The original Mastodon thread started here: https://social.coop/@dynamic/111247744283309930