also remember just like how lemmy has it’s kbin, mastodon has it’s interoperable alternatives.

i bet a fair bit of the complaints i from people here (low character count, wanting to follow topics instead of people) would be solved by trying out a misskey fork such as firefish, iceshrimp or sharkey.

i don’t think there’s any instance out there with a char count lower than 1000, and antennas are really good (why limit youself to following a simple hashtag when you can follow any number of arbitrary keywords?) if you’re in a well federated instance (provided you’re ok with them not feeding into your home feed and them not being retroactive (so after you set up an antenna you’ll need to wait for new posts to filter in))

they aren’t as polished as mastodon since mastodon kinda ate everyone’s lunch in terms of developer attention, but they’ve been getting really good. just avoid flagship instances (> 1k active users) for the time being. scaling is still something not many of them have solved just yet