I don’t know how much use the friendica.iridescent.nz server has been getting. But to be perfectly frank, I would probably choose Hubzilla or Forte over Friendica, which everyone who’s been initially excited about has eventually given up on. Including its creator Mike MacGirvin (the fediverse’s very own Macguyver, able to build incredible things out of bits of string, lengths of bamboo, and duck tape).
All of MacGirvin’s server+client apps have the same basic pros and cons; a mind-blowingly flexible back-end, and an overwhelmingly confusing interface, (good UX is an anti-goal for him). But Hubzilla is a refactor of Friendica, which improves performance and updates the native federation protocol (in Hubzilla that became Zot), and Forte is the most recent refactor of that same PHP codebase (native protocol is a breaking refactor of Zot called Nomad). These newer protocol evolutions enable neat features that Friendica lacks, like Nomadic Identity.
As for which to use, that depends on the use case you want to serve, and whether you want the ActivityPub support as a plugin or a native feature.
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Hubzilla is aimed at the ‘everything but the kitchen sink’ CMS use case. They describe it as WordPress but natively federated. The default protocol is Zot. Getting AP working requires a plugin, which has to be installed by the admin of an instance, then turned on per-channel by people using it. I’ve heard the admin part isn’t too complicated, but as for the per-channel turn-on, that violates the Principle of Least Surprise pretty badly.
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Forte is aimed more at a social network use case, but like Friendica, it was designed around replacing 2010s FarceBook, rather than Titter (like Mastodon), so as with Friendica, the feature set is much richer than Mastodon. Forte’s default protocol is Nomad, but it also federates natively over AP, for backwards compatibility with Friendica, Hubzilla, and streams (AFAICT the surviving species in the lineage), and thus communicates natively with the rest of the fediverse (even if MacGirvin is grumpy about its existence).
In theory, it ought to be possible to build a better Hubzilla client app (web or otherwise) and plumb it into the server. But it’s worth noting that Disroot used to run an instance, and I believe a native mobile app for it was developed by people involved. But that mobile app is a dead parrot, and in the end Disroot ditched for Akkoma, and developed a web app for that. AFAIK vanilla Akkoma has a … minimal web interface inherited from Pleroma, but can be used with any Mastodon API client.
So if asked for a recommendation of a Zot/Nomad app to test, I would probably go for Forte. But TBH I’m excited for the FEPs the Mitra dev Silverpill is working on, explaining how to use Zot/Nomad-specific features with AP, so they can be implemented in a back-end that isn’t made of sticky tape and spare buttons (ie PHP). Ideally with both the AP C2S API and Mastodon API for supporting a wide range of apps (like Pleroma does).
