I don't know how I never stumbled upon Lemmy before, I've been looking for a worthwhile alternative to Reddit for over a year now. Guess I wasn't looking hard enough!
@LemmyNameMyself There clearly seems to be an uptick in Lemmy usage. I am on Friendica and just stumbled to this post in the Global Community tab after I saw a plethora of other Lemmy posts (yes, I am commenting on your post from a different social network altogether). This never happened ever since I joined the Fediverse almost a year ago (damn, how the time flies). The vast majority of the posts used to come only from Mastodon.
I am glad that the Fediverse is starting to become more diverse (ba-dum-tsss)
The ability to interact across platforms is pretty incredible. I've been looking into other fediverse platforms since my introduction to Lemmy -- thank you Reddit! 🥰
KBin looks interesting. I'm familiar with Mastodon, but before looking into Lemmy I never really understood what it meant that it was "federated". Tell me more about Friendica, please? If you don't mind, that is.
@aRatherDapperFox yep, it is a Facebook-like network. By default it looks like the older Facebook interface, but your server admin could add various themes for you to choose from. It also uses BB Codes for text formatting (so you can do some pretty wild stuff like having your text use different color, size, along with having images and other media content posted inline). You can have YouTube and Vimeo videos embedded inline, you can have title posts, you can like and dislike content (yes, there is a dedicated button for this, and yes, it does federate with platforms supporting it such as Lemmy or Kbin.
You can also use markdown on it if you feel like it (it will be remdered as the appropriate BBCode syntax).
You can create groups (called forums for some reason, but that will change), as well as group various people or accounts or pages in a single feed (similar to G+'s circle feature)
You can crosspost and interact with Twitter (although, understandably, devs decided to pull the plug on the appropriate addon, so expect bugs to appear in the following future). You can send a post by email to someone, you can crosspost to Tumblr, you can subscribe to RSS feeds, you even have initial support for bluesky if you aready have an account there (server-to-server communication is in the works). You can follow and interract with Diaspora accounts (another Facebook alternative that for some reason decided not to use ActivityPub).
You can create pages (just like on Facebook) and you can label them news or organization and a lot more stuff.
And yes, as you noticed, your server admin can add various addons to the Friendica instance so you can have various features.
If you want, you can set up a server for your friends/family and experience the Facebook of 2012 or so on steroids.