I use firefish (formerly calckey) as a sort of alternate to mastodon. It’s a fork of misskey (forked a couple of years ago I think).

And yea, it’s a nice alternative to mastodon, not least because you’ll be able to interact with mastodon people just fine, and will have more features than them not fewer.

The main thing its got going for it is a nicer/better/richer UI with longer comments as default.

It also has a lot more actual features (like search, channels, pages, grouped bookmarks, markdown that allows animation and antennas for creating feed from filters). But in the end, having poked around it a bit, many of these features require polish before they’re true selling points in comparison to markdown.

The selling points that apply now are the UI or interface, the emoji reactions, richer markdown support (where mastodon has none, WTF, it’s 2023!), longer post lengths, and actual threading of conversations! You could also add that mastodon is too dominant and platform diversity needs to be supported.

no, did calckey for a bit (now firefish) which I think was based on misskey. It’s nice, basically a rich-text with lots of emoji reaction support etc expansion of Mastodon in many ways.

In the end, found the more simple approach of Mastodon my speed.

Go firefish in case you want to try this fedi-family, it already has notes editing if compared to misskey

Looks like it’s quite popular in Japan.

Yeah, but it’s almost all in Japanese (for now) so I can’t relate to its contents. Kinda looks like Mastodon imo but with more features.

I’ve tried it a couple times, it’s neat, lots of features, but that makes it a bit confusing. I’ve also had trouble finding a stable English speaking general purpose server that’s reliable, all the one’s I used were down more than they were up. You might want to look at Calkey or whatever they’re calling it now, that’s an active fork.