@leraje @muntedcrocodile The architecture of their protocol is highly incompatible with the way ActivityPub works.
With their protocol you have got the PDS (Personal Data Storage) that stores your data. Your handle is a hostname, but normally it will not be the hostname of your PDS. In fact you can use any hostname that you have control of. Your account itself is described via the DID that will never change - and that doesn’t contain a hostname. This means that you can move between different PDS without people noticing it at all.
In ActivityPub the data storage is on the same host like your handle and your account’s URL will always point to the host where your data is located. Moving your account is by far not as smooth and highly depends on the system that you are on.
@blue_berry Friendica does have both a chronological feed (that can be sorted by creation date of the post, the date that the post arrived at the system or the date that thread was changed the last time) and also some algorithmic feeds (called “channel”) that displays posts of their followers based on some rules. Also there are channels with posts of all kind that are discussed a lot in the last times. Another channel shows content from people that are followed by the people that I follow. Other ones are language based, etc.
This is a brand new feature and will be part of the upcoming release. Of course the plan is that the user can tweak the rules.
@spitz @olivier Eventually Benjamin, one of the main developers, completely rewrote the communication stack. I can remember sitting together with him at the C3 in Hamburg (not sure which year), talking about possible protocol extensions, which I then implemented in Friendica on the fly. Fun fact: With the exception of the polls, Friendica supports more parts of the Diaspora specification than Diaspora itself 😁
At that time I had the idea to abandon our own protocol (DFRN) and to completely switch to Diaspora. But there were some things (like our groups), that weren’t implemented in the protocol. Also then ActivityPub got momentum and I started the implementation. And later Friendica switched to AP as their default protocol. But we still - of course - support our own protocol and the Diaspora protocol.
@interdimensionalmeme There are different opinions about this. And luckily people can chose networks according to their specific opinions.