@Ruud - Since you admin what is apparently the largest of all Friendica servers I thought I'd ask you since you may have some insights about the stability issues with the platform. Mainly, what do you think is the cause of it?

Does the database just grow too large?
Does having a lot of users overwhelm it with requests?
Is it federated to too many/not blocking enough other servers?
Is it federated using too many different protocols?
Is it because it doesn't scale well?

I know you beefed up the server to scale it vertically and then spread out the front-end, and I think you said you're using S3 storage, so I'm not sure what else you could do. But I've also heard people say PHP and SQL are simply not good choices for a large social platform (I really wouldn't know).

According to FediDB friendica.world has 5,600 accounts and 519 monthly active users, which isn't even that much compared to some of the other fedi platforms. As you probably know since I think you also admin mstdn.social (273,000 accounts/11,500 MAU), mastodon.world (195,000 accounts / 7,000 MAU), and lemmy.world (192,000 accounts/14,000 MAU).

I've tried to do what I can to improve Friendica's front-end but I don't know much about how the backend works. I'd love to try and bring people over to Friendica from Facebook, but if it's too unstable, if it really only works if you run your own small instance, or if you find a small instance to sign up on, that's a tough sell.

I want Friendica to be a viable alternative to Facebook but worry it may never be more than a hobbyist curiosity. Especially if the Bonfire project actually delivers on their roadmap.