They're different projects serving different needs that hopefully will play well together.

Friendica is all about federation and integrated communications, but it isn't going to support thousands or hundreds of thousands of people per server.

Red will, but at a cost of losing integrated communications. You can't have both. Frequent polling simply does not and never will scale. (Though we can still make a lot of performance gains to reduce the impact).

By limiting the integrated communications, we can also do a lot of the things that people have complained about - such as "make this visible to just my friends" because we won't be incorporating networks that allow private stuff to leak.

There will be a few novel concepts and re-architecting of the backend in Red, but most of this can be backported to Friendica.

Friendica is always going to be a bit slower and have a slightly different set of features because of its federated architecture. However it's the more capable system.

As most of you have seen, I'm still working on both projects, but I can't give full attention to both without finding a wealthy benefactor to let me devote my full time to code.

Once Red is in a stable state, we can work out how to provide basic feature and performance parity and make Friendica the preferable option for individuals and families. Red will likely be the preferable option for public sites and organizations - including business.

I agree & disagree with some of the points in the article linked below. But, IMHO, the first point precisely explains the utter confusion that is D*/Makr...

The 10 Biggest Social Media Lies

1. Twitter and Pinterest are social networks.

Who started this one? For years, Twitter was accurately referred to as a microblogging service. But in the past year or two, suddenly everyone lumps it in with Facebook as a "social network." Pinterest, too.

They're not social networks. Twitter and Pinterest are blogging services in the same category as Tumblr, Blogger and Posterous (acquired by Twitter in March) -- services that let you publish your words, along with links and pictures, to lists of people who follow you. The only fundamental difference between Twitter and Tumblr, for example, is arbitrary limits on the number of characters you can post on Twitter.

Yes, Twitter and Pinterest are "social." But what isn't social these days?

And since everything is "social," we need reasonable criteria for what we mean when we use the phrase "social network," to distinguish actual social networks like Facebook and Google+ from social blog sites, social video sites, social whatever sites.

Some things are and should be defined by the existence of multiple features. For example, a home is defined in part by the existence of facilities for sleeping and eating and bathing and so on. It’s not one of these features, but all of them that makes a home a home.

A bathroom by itself is not a home. A kitchen by itself is not a home. A "home" by definition is a building with multiple basic functions for living.

A "social network" also requires a combination of communications media. Facebook, the quintessential social network, let's people broadcast status updates, post on walls, poke, chat, message, Skype, comment, upload pictures and more. It’s these multiple avenues of interaction that make a social network a social network.

Twitter is just “status updates.” Pinterest is just pictures with captions. As such, they don’t qualify as “social networks.” They can’t be meaningfully categorized with Facebook and Google+.

So let's stop being sloppy with language. Twitter and Pinterest are not social networks.