Great write up thank you. I had an account, but never really explored it properly. While I haven't been on Facebook in years, I think I was in some sort of Facebook mode when I tried it, and I never quite 'got it'. My expectations were all wrong, and all the fiddly bits a bit overwhelming.
Time to correct this.

When you start working on Lemmy review, can you test how Friendica interacts with it?
Lemmy, Kbin(not working), Mbin and Piefed (piefed.social) all work in same system but Lemmy.world (due Reddit exodus) got big and is first choice for many with lesser Lemmy instances showing up.
So I am interested how smooth it is. I like Kbin/Mbin style for reading threads. Really liked Kbin but without going into detail it was flooded by spam, so using Mastodon/Misskey.io and Hubzilla at times.

wonderful post. I'm one of these users who took a look, but never tried it because of the dated UI. But after reading your post I'm going to change that. Thx!

thanks! I'll let you know.

This really makes me want to move to Friendica, or at least something not Mastodon. I hate how limited the text and formatting options are, even though ActivityPub supports proper HTML posts.

@Elena Rossini ✏️✨📸 @Shrutarshi Basu Interesting you say that its not as solid or reliable as mastodon. Slow might be a better term for it. Its pretty solid and reliable. Problem is that because it has so much going on, its got to do a lot more. Mastodon is much more lightweight and does a lot less which is why its so much faster. The worst lags come from clicking on a circle feed. The devs don't take monetary donations just coding time donations so it development is sadly slower. They don't want to have to deal with the legal hassles of splitting money and possible taxes. Its always been a collective project at least since I joined in 2018 with no real head unlike with Mastodon with Eugen as the leader.
You mentioned the quaint look. It too is very customizable, which is why I made the video that its also a myspace alternative and you can really give it a myspace vibe if you want to which just feels like coming back home after myspace died.
An extra note about misskey. It was created in Japan and has a lot of japanese web vibes to it. A really good westernized version is called firefish. Unfortunately firefish.social is also their beta platform not their stable version which is very weird. ibe.social is a instance I would recommend. Try both, there are many different misskey forks. some more or less buggy than each other, it also has many friendica like features such as groups, though no where nearly as robust. I was going to switch to building my sustainable community toolkit on top of firefish but its too buggy and unstable for that and typescript doesn't appear to scale as well as PHP so it can slow down a lot once you have beyond a certain number of users.
Shrutarshi, I would create an account and explore friendica until you get comfortable with it. It does take some serious getting used to because there is too much choice. Look up friendica tutorial on youtube and you will get my 6 part series, and I will try to get pt 3 up in a week or two on channels which can turn it into basically a tiktok/IG alternative. You definitely need to keep your mastodon account for a bit until you are sure you have a good grasp on it, then you can switch over. I had a masotodon account alongside friendica which was my main hub until last year when they fixed an annoying issue with photo uploads, and will keep pixelfed around until they make video upload easier. Apparently video uploads are possible but not easy.