You’re absolutely right about PeerTube. However, given the recent decisions made by YouTube and its parent company on adblocking, I think we might see a surge in PeerTube content and development soon.

One thing I have noticed in the past year is that whenever Big Tech services become compromised or make controversial decisions, the Fediverse equivalent starts to bloom. I joined Mastodon and Lemmy earlier this year because of the controversies surrounding X and Reddit. Now that YouTube has done the same, I think we will soon see a “great migration” to PeerTube.

Just my two cents.

There is also “Owncast”, but it seems to suffer from the same issue that peertube does; there is no integrated revenue system for the streamer, so there is little reason to put effort in to the quality, as well as it being fairly unknown, so even if you set up donos etc. the audience isn’t there.

The discoverability don’t help, since there isn’t really s good way to filter out all the “24/7 radio” -streams, so even if you actively follow the frontpage, or a category, you have to skim trough them manually. Also, there is no proper language filter (at least if you don’t have an account), and it seems it’s more popular with non-english speaking streamers.

As a user: Pixelfed is a nice replacement for Instagram. It’s very clean and it captures what Instagram used to be years ago

It just needs users. Right now I’m following artists and creatives

For Microblogging so far I’ve used Mastodon because it seems to have the most feature complete apps from what I’ve seen (Megalodon and Tusky are both good). For the most part they interface together, I follow people on Misskey.

While it’s got a good amount of activity I don’t use it as much as Lemmy since the advantage here is that things are sorted into communities so it’s easier to find good content. You can follow tags on Mastodon, but because it has no real algorithm and the “toots” are less substantial than Lemmy submissions I find that you get a lot of banal status updates. It also has to compete with Bluesky which has more name recognition being made by ex-Twitterites that also draws more users away from it. If you can find good people to follow it’s good but I think we’re still waiting on a critical mass of people to move from the former site.

Takahē is looking for new maintainers. It’s a microblogging server in the beginning stages of development. As far as I know, there aren’t many (if any) instances outside the main development instance.

idkfa is a new fediverse project from ted unangst, who is the creator of honk (another AP microblogging project)

I’ve been enjoying Firefish for my Mastodon content. I like the extra features and interface better than stock Mastodon.

Though, unless I just can’t find it, there doesn’t appear to be any way to follow a hashtag on Firefish, which is a bit of a bummer. The antenna feature is alright at filling in this gap, but it’s not perfect.

Firefish works mostly okay with third-party apps, but none of them seem to be able to do some of the more advanced features like the live, auto-refreshing feeds, which is a feature I rather enjoy. So I’ve been pretty content with just using the PWA on my phone for the time being. The mobile interface is solid enough that I don’t feel a strong need for a dedicated app just quite yet. Notifications can be delayed by a few minutes, but I can tolerate that.

Nobody in this thread seems to have mentioned #Kbin. It’s an instance that aims to combine the #microblog structure of instances like Mastodon with the thread structure of instances like Lemmy.