There are a bunch of other social apps, but to be honest #Mastodon for me seems to be the most polished & has the most users (so it's the most social).

If you can think of a good reason to check out the others please let me know why 🙂

Some aren't just microblogging, but do other things too.

These are the other apps available:
#Diaspora #Pleroma #Friendica #GnuSocial #HubZilla #Misskey

Just to respond to "(Mastodon) has the most users (so it's the most social)."

I know this takes a bit of time to get used to, but federated platforms aren't in competition with each other.

When one federated platform grows, that also increases the audience for the other platforms that federate with it. As long as cross-platform federation is maintained, then success of one platform helps the others.

Because of this co-operative nature, you really don't need to check which Fedi platform has the most users when deciding which one to use.

To take it to an extreme, if a developer created a Fedi platform for themselves that literally no one else used, but it was still compatible with Mastodon etc... well then, they can be just as social as anyone on Mastodon, because they can still follow people, people can follow them etc.

The Fediverse co-operates because because it helps us all, but sincere co-operation is a concept that doesn't exist in Twitter, Facebook etc.

That all makes sense, thanks for the insight.

I literally just signed up to Pixelfed and it is indeed super polished, the new dark mode UI is lovely too.

Thanks for the explanation.

I'm still getting to grips with the way it all works, it truly is amazing.

I found that Mastodon had a great buzz instantly when I signed up, & I attributed that to the amount of active users in my instance and the wider Mastodon instances.

From what you're saying it sounds like all of the Mastodon activity shows up to the same extent elsewhere, like say on Friendica?

The type and amount of activity varies by specific server, whatever platform software it runs.

It's who is on a server and who they follow and who follows them, that's what determines what is visible of the Fediverse from that server.

So, a Friendica server where the users have many follows/followers will be connected to far more of the Fediverse than a Mastodon server with few follows/followers.

(Relay servers can also help if a small server feels too isolated, but after a certain amount of follows the isolation gradually reduces anyway.)