I had heard about Mastodon and was aware of the concept of federated platforms. This is the first fedi service that I signed up for and I was very surprised at how easy it was and how optimistic the vibe was. Afterwards I decided to check out Mastodon, Pixelfed and Matrix. I found this cool website that tracks users accross the different instances and services https://fedidb.org/ I’m blown away by the growth of Lemmy.
The New Zealand community feels very small and tightknit on these platforms. I have never been a social media person so I do not know what to post.
Have you branched out to any other platforms? If so whats your experience been like compared to the alternative services?
What are some interesting people/instances to follow on Mastodon/pixelfed? I am interested in people who work on projects and document their progress and show off things they made. Also cute pets.
One of the big weaknesses of Mastodon is it does a poor job of showing replies to posts, if you’re on a small server. A lot of replies don’t get federated, so you won’t see them. It’s rubbish. I spent weeks trying other software until I found one that proactively goes to the original server and retrieves replies on the fly, when you view the thread. It is called ‘Akkoma’ and it is fantastic.
https://mycrowd.ca/ is the Akkoma instance that I settled on.
Another major limitation of Mastodon is all replies are shown in a single long list, unlike lemmy. For this reason I quite like Friendica. Friendica has a UI that is reminiscent of Facebook. https://venera.social/ is a good instance. However now that Lemmy/Kbin is blowing up I feel less need for it.