These past days many people seem to have migrated to the fediverse and some are complaining about the limitations of Mastodon for example, since most are using that (it is the most popular). Mastodon is great, is sleek, well developed, and I'd say looks the best and is the most reliable perhaps. But some people want better features and I ended up replying to them individually. I am making this post to explain why I moved from Mastodon to Friendica and why I chose Friendica despite trying a lot of other alternatives.

The great things about Friendica:

• It is very easy to use; the default Frio theme it comes with looks very intuitive. For our instance we have created custom themes social.trom.tf so that it looks even better in my view.
• Connects with pretty much everything. Mastodon, Pleroma, Hubzilla, Lemmy, Peertube....
• Can follow RSS sources as "normal contacts". That's amazing since you can follow websites directly.
• You can create huge posts, format the text (basic formatting), add inline media, and even use markdown.
• You can setup any contact (even RSS sources) to auto repost their posts. For example we also have a Peertube account and I setup that so when we post a new video on Peertube, it also goes to our Friendica page. As native post or re-share, up to you. So awesome!
• Has a calendar and you can schedule and organize events.
• Has very well defined "news feeds": chronologically, based on activity, or based on your participation.
• Auto contact discovery or random profile discovery.
• Can integrate with Twitter so you can post to your twitter from friendica, or interact/connect/follow anyone on twitter.
• You can setup your profile in different ways, such as a page, personal profile, or even forum.
• You can have multiple profiles under 1 account.
• Send private messages in a mail-like interface.
• Follow search results or tags.
• Ignore/block contacts.
• Filter/block the posts based on language or other rules.
• 2FA authentication.
• You can use it as your email client and receive/send emails too (did not test this tho).
• Works with Mastodon's API so any Mastodon app/client should work with Friendica too.
• It is developed by some very very nice people!

The not-so-perfect:

• Their default theme needs some improvements in my view. People may look at that and think that this is not a very modern social network. Mastodon nails it!
• Their website needs to be a lot more attractive. People going there have no clue about how awesome Frendica is.
• Should handle video platform embedding better.
• Maybe should add reactions to posts.
• Should better handle images - how they are displayed and such.
• Should have an "app"....I do not use phones really, so this does not affect me, but nowadays this can be important.

Maybe that's all. Anyone feel free to let me know if I've missed anything and I can edit the post.

Here is the presentation page for our instance trom.tf/social/ #tromlive