But it has so much potential! Really overhauling the UI would make a huge difference.

My last attempt to make a go with Friendica was friendica.world. Even with just a few thousand users they couldn’t really get it to scale. It was laggy or throwing off errors regularly and sometimes unusable for days. Just a rough experience. Although that was a while ago now and I’m not sure about the state of that server. Who knows, maybe they figured it all out.