would you care to detail how the two systems differ for you personally?

Well, I don't know if it's my setup (I'm using Firefox with quite a lot of extensions) or if it's the site itself but coming from Twitter I found it relatively hard or cumbersome doing basic things such as attaching images to a post, integrating with third party apps on PC and mobile and even simply following other people.

The more popular third party apps I had a look at seem to mostly be made for Mastodon and so despite the underlying Fediverse protocol I had a mixed experience. For Friendica this means that often I could kind of get them to work but then I couldn't enter certain screens such as the settings screen or toggles wouldn't work here or there.

I wanted a comparison with Mastodon and so I set up an account to see for myself. Turns out, that over there - at least for the specific server I chose - all those things tend to be a little faster, with way less clicks and just feel a bit more modern. Mastodon doesn't have a calendar tab but that's okay for me. It also seems to go for an overall design more in line with the one from Twitter. No problem with app integration either.

Following people on Friendica - unless I misunderstood the approach - is this whole process where I have to copy a user's handle into a form and submit everything, pulling me out of my current context, while on Mastodon I can just click the follow button and I'm done.

I get that Friendica focuses on privacy and so this may involve some tradeoffs here and there. For me personally I just found that for continuous use things have to be streamlined enough for me to want to come back and I'm getting that more with Mastodon.

I might not have wrapped my head around Friendica entirely though because, at least on paper, the platform including its UI seems way more customizable and interoperable with other decentralized social media platforms. It seems to be more focused on power users which I am admittedly not ;)

Mastodon is not Twitter - it's way less addictive by design and has its own little quirks but I guess for me it's somewhere in the middle between a power user system like Friendica and Twitter itself.

In any case, I know that managing a server is hard work and so thanks for putting in the effort and providing this service for free! Since Twitter is morphing into this democracy endangering lunatic platform it's even more important getting people off there and providing sensible social media alternatives out of reach of sociopath billionaires and unaccountable corporations.

thanks for that writeup. i was expecting something like that, i roughly feel the same about it. we stupidly ran a mastodon instance on the abraum.de main domain for testing 2 years ago and deleted it, because it was very confusing, so that domain is now burned for mastodon/fediverse because of key-exchange blah... it is quite obvious that mastodon has much more development going on. i think at some point we will set up one here as well on a different subdomain to check it out again. i also feel that friendica is too cumbersome at places to be used as my daily/main social media thing.