One interesting thing I'm seeing this minute are the active people who follow me back. I recognize many names, as I read their posts (I can't say toots, and I been on Mastodon since the first year). TBH, I'm not sure being on this instance makes any sense, but someone once said, "One cannot make love to all the women in the world, but one must try." I feel that way about platforms.
It can be interesting to try another neighborhood, even if it's still Mastodon. It is definitely interesting to try different software, like FireFish/IceShrimp[0], Pleroma/Akkoma[1] or Friendica[2], as the experience can be drastically different. Even a Mastodon fork like Hometown can have features like local-only posting that give you a different community experience, different incentives and habits.
If you have time and interest for that kind of thing!
I like Friendica because personally it reduces my FOMO compared to if I'm on Pleroma or Mastodon.
If you want to try, I can recommend these general-purpose neighborhoods for each software, open for registration, operations stable, good filters, not too isolated, no toxic community:
[0] fedia.social/ [1] pleroma.envs.net/ (manual approval, but I got approved for a passive alt, no problem) [2] venera.social/ (again, daily quota and manual approval, but should not be an issue)
@clacke@baymud Thanks for the shout out! I mostly use the web or Elk sometimes on the phone. I actually have tried most of these, but didn't like the web interface as much as plain old Mastodon. I was even on Hubzilla for a moment, but although it offers a lot of connectivity, including to Diaspora, where I know a few people, I found that UI totally unusable. Pleroma and Akoma, I didn't see any advantage. Firefish was overwhelming. Friendica seems nice, but I still prefer Mastodon.
Halcyon and Pinafore have been popular before, but are resting since a while back. Pinafore fork Semaphore is resting too after the initial spurt of updates.