#friendica is one of the longest lasting #Fedi platforms, around longer than Mastodon for instance, some people say it's the Facebook of the 'verse, but I'm not sure if that's accurate. When I first joined the 'verse I still spent a lot of time of time on Facebook because of how little content I saw on GNU Social.
One of the folks I followed from their recommended I really try out Friendica as it supported significantly more protocols than GS did. I gave it a shot. While in 2023 most everyone, including GS, supports activityPub, so there's a lot more content in general, Friendica still supports more than anyone else, and supporting RSS Feeds was what got me hooked. I never actually had used RSS regularly when it was more popular in the 00s-10s, I never really "got" it, and found it easier to just go to the websites than follow a feed. But having RSS in my social media feed, just like any other friend's post, that was something completely different. It allowed me to get high quality content to read regularly, comment on, share with my friends etc., even though the content creators themselves hadn't yet joined the 'verse. Plus their "add friend" feature is like magic, allowing me to just enter a www address and it would find a feed for it, even those that don't seem to advertise anywhere on the site that they have RSS feed, or in some cases I suspect its baked into their base (Wordpress?), don't even realize they have an RSS Feed.
I'm posting to this Lemmy group from Friendica right now, (where it shows as a "Friendica Forum" which is pretty much the same thing only missing the the ability to sort by hot/new/etc. But then again, the sort options it does use, might be the same.
Social Media isn't collapsing, it's getting better.
If you want to try it out clearly I like opensocial.at, but you can see if there's a better one for you dir.friendica.social/servers or friendica.fediverse.observer/
#SorryNotSorry for being an evangelist here. I'll post the feeds I follow in a bit.
@rglullis Any project has a mission statement. or they should if they want their project to maintain for any lenghth of time. Lemmy is started by marxist-lennists, so I suspect their mission is related to trying to establisxh a marxist-lenninst society and anything that doesn't step towards achieving that goal probably isn't needed by the project. Establishing clear and understanable mission statements, and a way to update them if necessary, is a great way to tell when the right time to Fork a project is. There is certainly the niche way of doing it just because you can, like owning an AR-15, but that probably doesn't have great utility. I'm certainly not going to feed my family with an AK, and no one is going to use my poorly (read not at all) maintained fork of GNU Social.
I'm a Libertarian, so I have no objection to corporations controlling networks. At this point in history I don't see any reliable way for worker-cooperatives, private individuals, etc. to do so. But I've been a GNU evangelist my entire adult life. If Facebook ran on Free Software rather than closed source proprietary software, backed up by the force of governments, I'd be much more comfortable using it.
One of the great things about #Fediverse, or more accurately ActivityPub, like email before it (or more accurately POP, SMTP, etc.) is that there isn't a network to control. #FreedomsTheAnswer