Just like Facebook, Friendica also has a sort of activity center where you can see all previous notifications. It was ~2 years ago when I first discovered Lemmy. Back then, .ml was the most active instance, with Beehaw on the rise as well. I remember I started by posting in non-political communities at first, and nothing bad happened. But the moment I started to show them how brainwashed I was by Western Imperialist propaganda (sic), they immediately resorted to downvoting all my posts and comments like crazy - be them political or not. Below there’s a screenshot with my beloved Russian Government shill living somewhere in the West, Yogthos gave me a downvote (dislike) to a post I did in a test community. Don’t even know why they bothered, since neither Lemmy and especially Friendica do not have imaginary points for activities on posts and comments. But there’s that, lol.
Yeah, its running on the same physical hardware even, which is owned by the devs.
There are a few pains with switching over, like all the Lemmy apps adding incomplete support for piefed and moving on, and there not being any piefed focused apps yet, but i fully switched awhile ago.