@marek Since you asked for perspectives...

I started using Friendica in 2011 as a way to escape Facebook, and censorship (I was living in China at the time). "Federating with everything" was the concept that sold the system, but I knew I'd need something to keep it worthwhile even if all the proprietary APIs disappeared, and RSS was that something. So all these years I've basically been using it as an RSS feed reader.

I agree that video support is important. I want to share on Friendica the same way I used to on Facebook: mostly text updates, but if I have something best shared as video, I want to share it as a video.

The connectivity is what matters to me more than the front end, because I use mailstream to read messages and so I only see the front end when I post something - and I use emacs to compose the post. Obviously I am far away from a typical user. But I have found that using metatext to share photos works better than using the web front end, and I think that's probably a sign.