Apart from the groups (forum) thing, Friendica is really good at “floating” posts (which of course could be topic-specific) to “the top” of their streams, based on interactions in the thread. This is a user setting, and the user can set various criteria for when a topic should bounce up to the top of the stream, but the thinking is very much like in Discourse (and other) forum software.

The user can chose between having threads (and that is the full threads, starting with the original post on top and with all the comments in the thread) bounced to the top based on “latest interaction”, “latest post” and “latest creation”. Why is this good? Well for very busy threads that thread could otherwise dominate the view for a day or two, and if you wish to see things your friends who are not in that thread post you can filter so that “latest creation” perhaps give you a wider view of the rest of your contacts (who are not interacting in the “monster thread”).

For the user of Friendica this means that their home stream isn’t filled by disconnected replies saying “I agree!” or “That was beautiful!” and you then have to open up that message to get the context (like on Mastodon); In Friendica you instead get the full thread, and the “I agree!” message is clearly shown as a reply to something specific that you also can see, which might be a reaction to a reply in a longer thread that you also can see.

#Friendica is great.

@mark @atomicpoet

@_ade ah, no.

So my moc.d-x-b.com/ is running #Akkoma (akkoma.social/) and my friendica.hellquist.eu/ is running #Friendica (friendi.ca/), both hosted by me on my own servers. Then I also have a #Pixelfed account on pixelfed.social/i/web/profile/…

They all have different purposes and functionality. #Mastodon itself is just the most famous Fediverse service, and where most people land. Probably this is due to the fact that there is a company behind it, whereas the other services are run by collectives of individuals, with no pay or other incentives, other than the conviction they are doing a good thing. It is a shame they are not taking up more article/news space though, especially since Mastodon itself isn’t as good as some of the others when it comes to features.

The flipside of the features coin though is that some have added “opinionated” features of the underlying ActivityPub standard, which is cool for those users of that particular service, but it also fragments the overall Fediverse further. Having said that, Friendica for example is better than Mastodon at following, and being compatible with, other Fediverse services.