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Fediverse meta noob question
Can someone give and/or point at a nice comparison between #Mastodon and #Friendica ? Being on the former, should I also be on the latter? What are the most interesting differences from the user (not the node-admin, say) view?
A few differences:
Federation
#Mastodon: federates with everything that has #ActivityPub
#Friendica: federates with everything that has ActivityPub plus everything that has #OStatus plus #Diaspora plus #RSS (both directions; can follow feeds and produces feeds) plus WordPress (without the ActivityPub detour) plus e-mail (no, really, I'm serious) etc.
Maximum character count
Mastodon: 500 characters max.
Friendica: essentially unlimited (actually up to 200,000, depending on the node)
Text formatting
Mastodon: nope, can't even parse it when it comes from something else
Friendica: bold, italics, underline, lists, various text sizes, various text colours, essentially everything that BBcode allows you to do
Post titles
Mastodon: nope again, can't even display post titles from somewhere else
Friendica: can display them, can generate them
Likes
Mastodon: stars
Friendica: first social network ever to have both likes and dislikes, still has them
Quotes
Mastodon: nope, and will probably never be introduced
Friendica: yep
Profiles
Mastodon: one profile per account
Friendica: as many profiles per account as you want; you can assign specific profiles to specific contacts or groups so that they can get to know more or less about you
Profile fields
Mastodon: five free-text profile fields
Friendica: literal dozens of them, and that's per profile
Groups/forums
Mastodon: needs the external service Guppe for something that roughly resembles forums in functionality
Friendica: has forums built-in
Themes
Mastodon: choose between light and dark theme
Friendica: several actual themes to choose from which in turn can be modified
Calendar
Mastodon: nope
Friendica: event calendar with both personal and public events
Images
Mastodon: upload one to who-knows-where; it's automatically placed at the beginning of your toot
Friendica: upload them to your own built-in file space, embed pretty much as many of them as you want wherever you want in your post, not to mention the photo album functionality
Audio
Mastodon: have fun clicking URLs to external sites
Friendica: embed SoundCloud or audio files uploaded to your file space
Video
Mastodon: have fun clicking URLs again
Friendica: embed YouTube or Vimeo or video files uploaded to your file space
Lists/groups
Mastodon: clunky list editor, only four lists visible at a time, can't choose which
Friendica: elegant point-and-click group editor, list as many groups as you please next to your stream
Want me to pit either or both against #Hubzilla?
Federation
#Mastodon: federates with everything that has #ActivityPub
#Friendica: federates with everything that has ActivityPub plus everything that has #OStatus plus #Diaspora plus #RSS (both directions; can follow feeds and produces feeds) plus WordPress (without the ActivityPub detour) plus e-mail (no, really, I'm serious) etc.
Maximum character count
Mastodon: 500 characters max.
Friendica: essentially unlimited (actually up to 200,000, depending on the node)
Text formatting
Mastodon: nope, can't even parse it when it comes from something else
Friendica: bold, italics, underline, lists, various text sizes, various text colours, essentially everything that BBcode allows you to do
Post titles
Mastodon: nope again, can't even display post titles from somewhere else
Friendica: can display them, can generate them
Likes
Mastodon: stars
Friendica: first social network ever to have both likes and dislikes, still has them
Quotes
Mastodon: nope, and will probably never be introduced
Friendica: yep
Profiles
Mastodon: one profile per account
Friendica: as many profiles per account as you want; you can assign specific profiles to specific contacts or groups so that they can get to know more or less about you
Profile fields
Mastodon: five free-text profile fields
Friendica: literal dozens of them, and that's per profile
Groups/forums
Mastodon: needs the external service Guppe for something that roughly resembles forums in functionality
Friendica: has forums built-in
Themes
Mastodon: choose between light and dark theme
Friendica: several actual themes to choose from which in turn can be modified
Calendar
Mastodon: nope
Friendica: event calendar with both personal and public events
Images
Mastodon: upload one to who-knows-where; it's automatically placed at the beginning of your toot
Friendica: upload them to your own built-in file space, embed pretty much as many of them as you want wherever you want in your post, not to mention the photo album functionality
Audio
Mastodon: have fun clicking URLs to external sites
Friendica: embed SoundCloud or audio files uploaded to your file space
Video
Mastodon: have fun clicking URLs again
Friendica: embed YouTube or Vimeo or video files uploaded to your file space
Lists/groups
Mastodon: clunky list editor, only four lists visible at a time, can't choose which
Friendica: elegant point-and-click group editor, list as many groups as you please next to your stream
Want me to pit either or both against #Hubzilla?
Fediverse meta noob question
@ceoln
I'm by no means an expert. In my experience, Mastodon has way more active users, and is a much more polished interface. I want to like Friendica, since I'm more used to the 'FB' style of social networking, but without all my friends/family on there it isn't the same. At any rate, you should be able to follow Friendica accounts from Mastodon and vice versa. Or make a Friendica account there and play around!