I never thought about this indirect upside of using fediverse apps. There is absolutely no incentive to publicity, who the heck is gonna pay me for promoting their book over my BookWyrm? They will make two cents from that.

So when someone publishes something over these underdog app it's because they are genuinely interested. It's really refreshing to be able to read sincere opinions from people tbh.

Just a side note, ActivityPub protocol - the core engine that lets all of fediverse to talk to the rest of the fediverse is… 5 years old. Every feature imaginable is still to be implemented.

I personally really enjoy Matrix but it’s not really a “fediverse” thing but it is a federated end to end encrypted messaging platform

Calckey has the superior feature set to Mastodon by far. When the project matures, it'll be a force to reckon with.

I use GoToSocial with Sempahore for my microblogging (alternative to Mastodon).

Also Owncast as an alternative to Twitch.

And then I watch tilvids.com and other Peertube instances for videos.

And of course Lemmy. :-D

Oh and then there's Funkwhale for audio.

It's all in different states of usability, depending on the communities involved.

Fediverse is well differentiated into many sites offering similar capabilities to their more well established commercial and proprietary counterpart, and as the time passes these federated alternatives quality is nearing practically the production level, apart from Mastodon and Lemmy which are the most known by now it is worth mentioning also PeerTube (Youtube), PixelFed (instagram), Misskey, Calckey and Pleroma (a mix between twitter and tumblr), HubZilla (facebook), FunkWhale(Bandcamp) and OwnCast (twitch).

Here some handy links:

https://joinfediverse.wiki/Main_Page

https://www.fediverse.to/

https://fediverse.party/

Interesting to see that tumblr is adding support for ActivityPub. I wonder if any other legacy platforms will undertake to federate.

Another good alternative to GoodReads is StoryGraph. I prefer it over BookWyrm because it has a nicer user interface and it has an app. However, I don't believe it is apart of the Fediverse.

Try writefreely. Its a blogging thing that supports markdown and can look super nice

I just tried Calckey it looks more polished UI-wise than any other Fediverse platform I have seen so far. I think Calckey would make an excellent social platform for the public (non-tech) users.

Pixelfed is also an excellent Instagram alternative, it reminds me of how Instagram used to be before the Facebook acquisition. Their iOS beta app is in good shape as well.

@BobQuasit I am on Friendica. It is a macroblogging platform, but more akin to Facebook in look and feel (it even somehow resembles the old Facebook, but server admins can add other themes to give it a different look). The feature set is very extensive, and it is way richer than Facebook, tho. You might find it a bit complicated at first. I would recommend anyone to watch this video series to learn more about it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvOmvEpmgQI

After you learn all about it, you might find it your Fediverse home.

Never heard of BookWyrm. Excited to check it out! Thanks!