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Hi and welcome to #Friendica !

If you're interested by the reasons, I can give you a few:
  • Mastodon started in 2016. By that time, Friendica was already 6 years old and the original creator had already left the project 4 years before to work on RedMatrix/Hubzilla.
  • Mastodon does one thing (micro-blogging) and does it well, Friendica does many things but often very confusingly. The real shining point is the wide protocol support, but this is a niche feature not many users really need.
  • Mastodon benefitted from wide mainstream media coverage from at least 2017, although the tone has been mixed. Initially praised as the "new hot thing" by The Verge, it's also been criticized, often unfairly, but even bad publicity is publicity. In comparison, Friendica is virtually unknown and we are currently making no efforts to change this.
BTW: I'm glad that Friendica is some kind of an underdog. Since Friendica does speak several protocols, there is no need for a huge number of servers to make the network vital. Also it reduces the pressure. I'm not sure if I would want to be in the spotlight.
Me neither, we have enough bug reports/feature requests as it is and I believe there would be some delay between an influx of users and an influx of developers to tackle the extra requests.
I like friendica, but faced the strange timeline and didn't like it. I think it's positionned to be a facebook-like, where I was looking for a twitter-like.
It's perfectly okay, and the best of all, we can still interact with each other!
I didn’t know Friendica had so much functionality! But the lack of users is likely in large part related to the UI and lack of publicity. Also, how easy (or difficult) is it to install and maintain an instance? Mastodon makes it much easier to run an instance than most federated social networks. A lot of stuff is very automated.
I'd say it's easier to install than Mastodon without Docker because there are less moving parts. It's a PHP application with a cronjob, and that's it. Works out of the box with a regular Apache installation through the provided .htaccess file, and we provide nginx configuration samples.
Hubzilla has niche features Friendica hasn't, but using both Mastodon and Friendica is indeed a mystery to me, as Friendica features nicely cover Mastodon's. If you don't need Friendica's extra features, then Mastodon is fine but having both at the same time?
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