They added the (never promised) metro system last year and just released another huge free update two days ago.

I’ve never used Misskey but used various Misskey forks for about a year. I ended moving back to Mastodon. In my experience, the forks are very good at all the extra razzle dazzle they add (MFM, emoji reacts, drive, etc.) but often aren’t as good at the basics. I’d pretty routinely have federation issues, missing posts from my TL, and posts that would just repeat endlessly in the TL until I reloaded the page. And those are problems I experienced on every fork I tried. I found that stuff more of a minor nuisance at first but it got pretty old over time. It’s been a few months since I migrated back, so some or all of those issues could be fixed or improved by now too.

Also, app support isn’t great. I think most of the forks implement basic Mastodon support now that will allow most apps to work. But the downside is you only get Mastodon functionality in those apps and not the extras.

I use peertube.tv.

Stux (from mstdn.social) is the admin and he’s generally pretty great a running stuff. I haven’t used it a ton lately but no complaints!

Edit: Daaaamn. Just realized that registrations are disabled. Bummer. Sorry.

1. Lemmy
2. Mastodon
3. Pixelfed
4. Various Misskey forks that are all about the same
5. Peertube

Lemmy has eaten up just about all the time I used to spend on Mastodon. Pixelfed would be in the running for #1 if it hadn’t become so vaporware-y in the last few months.

Seemed like a cool thing to say in the moment. No good?

I said it was my Mastodon account but that server was running Firefish then a fork of Firefish called iceshrimp, neither of which are Mastodon. But it’s now a Mastodon account again.

I follow my own Pixelfed account on Mastodon and will often boost posts. I have a pixelfed.social account though. It’s probably a federation issue on your specific Pixelfed instance. I’ve moved the Mastodon account a bunch and I’ve had problems on specific instances. I was never able to see my Pixelfed posts from fedia.social (ice shrimp), for example.

I was also able to search, follow, and see your Pixelfed posts from mastodon.social.

Edit: Your two newest photos from Aug 31st aren’t actually showing up on m.s. and I can’t see them on pixelfed.social either.

To do that in the short term, the Fediverse probably just needs more money. The competitors have a fuckload of it and can introduce features way faster because of it. I think Mastodon’s been “exploring/planning” quote posts for like 18 months and haven’t even begun working on it. I’d love to have user-controllable, optional algorithmic feeds in Mastodon (not replacing the main reverse-chron feed) but I can’t imagine it existing in less than 5 years.

Mods cracking down on the plague of ‘polite’ harassment (ex. passive-aggressive FYIs about CWs) wouldn’t hurt. It’s not as bad as it used to be but it’s chased a ton of people away.

I think in the long term the Fediverse has an advantage. The only real goal Fediverse services have is to get better for users. At some point, Bluesky and Threads will have to make money or die. I don’t think they have a way to do that without damaging the user experience.

I don’t disagree with your points but I think they apply to pretty specific groups. I doubt that the average person knows or cares that Bluesky is a PBC. The reaction of the average person to ‘open source’ is probably, “I have no idea what that is and please for the love of god don’t explain it to me.”

1. There are more people there.
2. Fewer people even know the Fediverse exists at all.
3. Mastodon (where most would probably move from Twitter) has a reputation for being more difficult to use.

Nailed it

For sure, support isn’t always complete and the Masto API is doing a lot of heavy lifting. I think that Fedilab really wants to be a Fediverse app though. I’m pretty sure their development has slowed a lot in the last year too because their dev has had some health issues. Although it’s “tom79,” not Dansup (who makes Pixelfed and a million other things).

I don’t think it supports Pixelfed-exclusive features either. I don’t think there’s even an app that supports stories right now - even the official one.

I don’t think so. The closest might be fedilab. They support masto+ forks, pleroma, friendica, pixelfed, peertube, and many of the misskey forks partially (with fuller support promised). No Lemmy/mbin though and I haven’t seen anything saying that support is on the roadmap.

(there’s a little arrested development in the mix too)

Huzzah!

I can’t find a complete list, but McCue lists some examples here. These newly-federated magazines are apparently curated by the original 25 publishers in their initial test of federation. You can find the list of those publishers here. You should be able to find the magazines by searching for the publishers on Mastodon. Euronews’ Russia-Ukraine crisis magazine, for example, is:
@russia-ukraine-crisis-euronews@flipboard.com

I was able to follow all the publishers I tried. I also followed a few of the new magazines. Seems to work!