I believe Facebook’s name came from an actual thing. The company was created for college students. Many campuses, would give face books that had students and professors from the universities.
I agree that it is an exceptional software, perhaps the best of the Fediverse, but it has a terrible name. The reason for this name was to mark a continuity with the first potentially federated social network, namely "identi.ca"
Moreover, despite the name, it is not a really friendly software, but presents several ergonomic complexities.
Finally, I add that when I pronounce it with my dictation system, it is always transliterated as "free handicap", which is a very inclusive thing, but every time I have to correct it... 🤣
This is also why I decided to call my instance with a different name such as Poliverso, Too bad that a few months later Zuckerberg decided to launch his failed Metaverso project, which is why every time I have to explain that I did not call it that to parody the Metaverso 🤬
Isn't that what you want for a Facebook replacement though?
I guess being able to browse public profiles and posts would be good, but if it's like Facebook then wouldn't most people be using their real names and posting about semi-personal IRL stuff?
You'd want that stuff to only show for your friends, and maybe friends of friends
Let's hope that there are also a few organisations that run Friendica instances so that the offer becomes a bit bigger. In the last two years, everyone has been totally fixated on Mastodon and many have opened a Mastodon server without realising that there were other options.
The tough part about something like Friendica is that it's usefulness very dependent on how many of your friends are on it. You'd need a group of friends to all join together for it to stick.