Why Friendica?

Ease of getting your own node going, interoperability with other socnets, privacy features.

Which platform did you can from before switching to Friendica? (#Google+ #Facebook #Friendster #Multiply #Myspace #Diaspora #Movim etc.)

Was on was on joindiaspora.com for about a year, has Facebook and Twitter accounts but shitcanned them both in the last six months.

Where are you from? (real world place, nation, or region)

southwestern US.

How did you find about Friendica?

Martin Farrent mentioned it on either Diaspora or Identi.ca, I forget which. Devoured everything I could find about it and had deleted Diaspora account and set up shop with my own Friendica installation and account within one week.

If you are self-hosting, why did you self-hosted?

Control over my own data, extra space on my shared hosting account.

Why solo hosting? (if applicable)

A decentralized network is a free network.

Why host for your friends and family? (if applicable)

They don't want to bother with running an instance.

Why host a public instance? (if applicable)

Share the love, help other people make the move to Friendica.

Anything else you want to share not covered by the questions above? Or perhaps suggestions or feedback or a statement (that some of us writers can use as a testament to the success of Friendica)?

The community has been very helpful, I'm excited to be a part of the early adopter crowd for once. ;)

Why Friendica?

1-Because I can make it my own.
2-Because I can contribute to the project.
3-A published API
4-Real, powerful federation and xposting opps.
On this last, I had written Xpostulate a couple of years before, and had blogs on WP, Blogger, LJ, IJ, DW, Posterous, and Tumblr, with different readers on each platform, and posted to all of them, plus more readers picking up my dents/tweets on identi.ca, twitter and FB, reaching, thus, a wide audience. Friendica actually simplifies that. One post to friendica can reach all of the above (although, at this point, I post to blogger via posterous).

Which platform did you can from before switching to Friendica? (#Google+ #Facebook #Friendster #Multiply #Myspace #Diaspora #Movim etc.)

I haven't completely canned any of them really, insofar as I still have accts on G+, FB and D*, but, my actually activity on them has reduced drastically. I especially use G+ and D* very, very little, now, and only log into FB to check private messages and stuff.

Never even tried friendster. Myspace and multiply are long dead, imho. Movim never got off the ground.

Where are you from? (real world place, nation, or region)

Connecticut, USA

How did you find about Friendica?

You know, I'm not sure.
I don't remember how I found out about either, D* or ~friendica , now.
I do know I learned of D*, first (not surprising, what with the media hype).
I may have heard of Friendica on D* or identi.ca.

If you are self-hosting, why did you self-hosted?

I like controlling my own data, knowing how stuff I use works, being able to contribute.
I had used a few public sites.
On one, I was dumped over political dispute with the admin.
A few others had performance issues, were down a lot, or didn't have all the plugins I wanted to use installed,
but mostly, I wanted to contribute more, to know more about the inner workings, which means digging into code,
and which means being able to test stuff, which means, having my own installation to play with.

Why solo hosting? (if applicable)

I almost wish I'd stayed with just self-hosting, on tonybaldwin.me, but

Why host for your friends and family? (if applicable)

I had this domain laying around doing nothing, free-haven.org, which I had initially purchased and set up as a site for the local Occupation, with a dokuwiki, phpbb, and statusnet installation. They used the phpbb forum for about a month and then all went back to their stupid FB, plus someone else involved built a WP-based site. They were not using my site. But I thought, hey, "free-haven.org" sounds like the PERFECT name for a friendica site! A Free Haven, indeed!

Why host a public instance? (if applicable)

My initial hope was that my local friends, especially the activists/occupiers, would see the value in friendica and join up, but they didn't. I've had one IRL friend (whom I'm dating) and one family member (my cousin, who joined up and hasn't logged in again) join, plus a couple of online friends from LJ, who have joined (one who has now contributed to our plugins, the other not really active). I decided to open up to more of the public, but still with "registration requires approval". If I allowed every registration, I'd have a couple hundred members now, but I think most registrations have been spammy-bots, anyway.
I've got a few quality people who have jumped on, like @Sean Tilley , whom I know from D* , a few people who had found and read http://www.farcebork.com and came on board. So, FH is "semi-public". I allow people on whom I can verify are real people, or whom I know. (early on I let someone on who was clearly a pr0n-spammer, their e-mail domain associated with a cam-show site...I was hoping for some interesting material to be posted, but they never posted anything...Hey, Camshow-girls! ~friendica is a perfect publishing platform for reaching a variety of other platforms!)

If you are not self-hosting:
Which instance are you with?
Why have you not chosen to self-host? (VPS is cheap nowadays, and some of us probably are willing [for a fee of course] to set you up from the ground up)

I think this is misleading. Hosting a Friendica instance requires significant resources.
As a site grows it's going to need storage and lots of RAM, and it's not exactly cheap.

Anything else you want to share not covered by the questions above? Or perhaps suggestions or feedback or a statement (that some of us writers can use as a testament to the success of Friendica)?

A point I repeatedly make:
Friendica is not just a social network. It is also a powerful publishing platform (all the xposting goodness), AND, a (social networking, news) aggregator/organizer, with the friend-groupings (like Circles-G+), tags, categories, and file features.
Makes it easy to, for instance, group all my family on FB, twitter, SN, tumblr, or whatever, into one group/stream, all my news feeds and sources, whether rss, FB, twitter, whatever into another, etc.

Friendica is a communications platform.