HAF is a general-purpose programming framework, whereas hivemind is focused on social media data.

Problems we encountered with hivemind inspired the creation of HAF. Originally, we were planning to break up hivemind into modular components (aka "modular hivemind"), allowing a hivemind operator to select which APIs they wanted to support. But performance limitations of hivemind led us to rethinking the way data is injected and processed in HAF.

So functionally, HAF has two major differences from hivemind: 1) it has a fork manager which enables apps to roll back actions performed when a block is processed, allowing apps to safely process head blocks as soon as they are generated and 2) it gets data from hived via a push model vs a pull model which lowers the CPU loading on hived, increases data throughput, and lowers latency time to process transaction data.

One of our next steps will be to port hivemind to turn it into a HAF app. This will allow hivemind to sync faster and it will also allow it to safely process head blocks and more quickly react to new blockchain transactions.