The Future of Social is Here: a Show and Tell (part 3: Friendica)

"Friendica only has about 14,559 total users ... 1692 are “monthly active users” ... [but] Friendica users are incredibly passionate about it... features-rich, unique and brilliant".

These include "add and follow RSS feeds and BlueSky accounts", which is enough to pique my interest. Elena Rossini is a new user, so she links to a few detailed guides and provides "the equivalent of a tasting menu":

• "an incredibly powerful aggregator of social networks and online content... with all the advantages of the open social web", it supports ActivityPub, OStatus, Diaspora & RSS/Atom "to bridge the gap between the fediverse and traditional social media"
• also supported: "email contacts and communications" and "other services via plugins".
• It also supported "two-way connection with Twitter... pre-Musk"
• dated user interface, so be "into substance, not style", but on the other hand "It’s far easier and quicker to visualize reactions and read replies to a post", with good people/content discovery via hashtags, fediverse account links, etc.
• organise connections into Circles so you can "browse posts by “Circle”" - cf Google+, Twitter/Mastodon lists) - as well as by “Protocol (ActivityPub, Bluesky, RSS/Atom...), by account type (persons, organisations, news, groups, relays) or by “Channels” (custom feeds, like “recent activity” “what’s hot”, “for you”, “followers”, “English” etc.)."
• "mobile responsiveness top notch"
• "you can follow hashtags", as on Mastodon
• "the default setting is to see “conversations my follows started or commented on” in the feed
• It's blogging: you can have post long, with formatted text, blockquotes, hyperlinks, emojis and inline images. See example

However, currently "Friendica infrastructure is not solid enough to scale and welcome a wave of new users", and "Friendica’s learning curve... is a bit steep" - challenging for typical social media users.