Does it much in practice though? I’m on mastodon and Lemmy a lot, and don’t see any friendica accounts out and about…

I know. But that is one of the bigger servers, and there aren’t that many at the moment. I think a facebook-style friend-based social network is going to struggle to boot-strap itself into a reasonable network density, at least in the foreseeable future. I don’t know what it would take to get non-techy pleb users to leave Facebook en masse.

Generals interest networks like Lemmy and mastodon have a much easier time getting started.

I don’t remember what server it was, maybe they had a good reason. I guess around 2016 there was a short boom that resulted in a lot of inactive accounts after a few months…

The software might be, but what makes a social network is the network effect, and the biggest public english friendica server has a few hundred users.

I had an account in like 2016, but it got deleted after a few months due to inactivity…