@irelephant [he/him] late to the post but i have been loving hubzilla. Its quite different, offers features for hosting communities (posts, articles, photos, calendar, chatrooms, wiki, webpages, etc.) and has impressive privacy controls that i’ve not seen till date (except other softwares of this family like friendica, forte, streams).
Misskey. It’s not exactly niche, but it has a lot of cool features.
For example:
- Drive features to reuse your image or other media.
- Misskey games, so far only have Bubble Game and Go.
- Groups
- Antenna, basically subscription for any post with your set of rules.
- Playful profile decoration, similiar to Discord/Steam.
In a better world, this (or one of its forks) would have taken off instead of Mastodon. It makes a way better case for itself by its distinct features compared to Mastodon, which is too easy to ignore (by everyday people) as Nerd-Twitter.
Misskey (I use sharkey, a fork of it) is really good. Groups don’t federate yet iirc.
Its frontend is extremely slow though.
And the search is awfull.
how ever the UI is pretty
The search doesn’t even work on my instance.
Lemmy is the only fediverse software with a good search imo.lol, tbh yeah.
even on mastodon which is relatively big the search is jst bad.
does mastodon’s search even work? Unless a post has a hashtag its near-unindexable.
Search on my Akkoma instance works reasonably well. Of course there is no central index, so it can only find what it has federated before.
My experience on Mbin says that the search is pretty good. It might be skewed because I mostly search for magazines, though.
I’m also on Sharkey. It’s just more fun that Mastodon. Also feels a touch more queer, in a wonderful way.
NodeBB. It’s a fairly popular webforum, but ActivityPub support is fairly new. It’s really something else to see the Fediverse through a the lens of the old Internet.
https://codeberg.org/grunfink/snac2 and https://gotosocial.org/
The snac2 dev made it using only openssl and curl libraries. It doesn’t even use a proper database, so it’s very lightweight.
Gotosocial is basically mastodon but easier to set up on the server and lighter on resource usage.
I’ve heard of snac, but never knew about the database thing. What does it use? static files?
from my brief time hosting snac, iirc it stores data in JSON files
