Patchbay is a little more gregarious - it gossips out to 3 hops along friend lines, whereas patchwork only goes 2 hops (your friends friends). This means you see a lot more people in patchbay. The /public feed should perhaps be retired at some point... it's pretty chaotic.

With /posts glyph is correct that you can see threads "rolled up". When a thread gets new posts it's moved to the top of the page again (the default view is "UPDATE" which is ordering by what's been updated. You can change it to "STARTED" and that's ordered by when they're started by. phew, that needs some better design).

Make sure you check out some of the patchbay unique features :

• /chess
• /books
• /calendar
• /inbox