I absolutely feel you! I'm sure you'd be very welcome on Mastodon, ping me and say hi if you decide to give it a whirl :)

You'd be very welcome! But no pressure, you can always take a look and decide it's not for you and that's totally ok too. I just want people to know about their options since I am definitely not the only one in a strop with Instagram 😂

Well, now you know more about it than 99.9% of other people do. Congrats, expert! :D

Definitely fair! I know some people still enjoy the big sites, but like I said it's just good to know other things exist so you can seem cool when it comes up in conversation :D

Haha, yup, definitely with you on that one! I found I just wasn't enjoying most of them so decided, eh, what's the point. My Fediverse ones though? Whole different ballgame. The vibe there is not for everyone but it's definitely for people like me :D

Found you :D

Ahhhh, I didn't know you had one too! Must go find it and see what I inevitably forgot to mention :D

Woohoo! Look at me I'm *influencing* 😂 Seriously though, it is very cool. And so nice to just post as often (or not) as you want without any worries. You may be able to tell from my entirely subtle hints, but Insta was my main motivation for checking this stuff out too. So. Many. Ads. Omg 🙄

@@TheGiddyStitcher yeah, the ads are super annoying but what annoys me even more is that reels are taking over. I want to use it for pics, not videos. I've never followed many accounts but rarely got to see what they actually posted. Instead I get overwhelmed with a million "suggestions".

Oh reels are the worst! I'm actually not 100% sure but I think Pixelfed might be image only...something to look into maybe if that's important to you. I will have to go check.

@@TheGiddyStitcher yes, Pixelfed is one of the things that made the whole thing more interesting. Also the community aspect. I'll definitely look into it over the weekend. I had a brief look at different servers. There are few that speak to me.

I did some more research into Pixelfed by logging into Dave's account, did a writeup in a reply to @crossed_threads further up in the comments, it might be useful for you too :)

Aw thank you!

YES! Now just for the scary part where I have to make sure you have a good time otherwise I get the blame :D

You tried Discord for me, I think you can definitely be excused from trying anything else new and weird for a looooong while! :D

And I like Discord, but there's only so much time in the day to do everything.

Don't I know it 😂

Old LJ was the best! It's where I first learned how to style a web page properly and then I became an actual professional web developer. Yeah you'd fit in fine on Fedi 🤓

Discord is very much it's own separate thing, and I agree it can be a bit much sometimes! There is actually a Fediverse alternative to Discord but tbh it's not great (yet). Is there anything specific you want to know about Pixelfed? I can have a poke around and find out for you 🙂

@@TheGiddyStitcher basically I'm looking for Instagram without the ads and algorithms. I want hashtags to work again. I want to see comments not reels and stories... Etc.

It does sound like it might be worth a look, in that case! Dave let me log into his account and have a poke around and while it seems they do support video content, I literally can't find any so I guess people aren't really using it for that / they're not being pushed. Stories is a thing, but again nobody he's following seems to use them. It seems like you can follow hashtags just like we can on Mastodon, and I think you can even import your pics from Insta. You'd still be able to follow the rest of us over on Mastodon, but you'll not see our pure text posts you'll only see media posts. Which may be exactly what you want especially given how much I'm likely to talk about Eurovision over the coming months! The main thing I'm not sure about is the state of Pixelfed mobile apps. It looks like they do have an official app but it's currently in testing, and the page says you can use most Mastodon apps too so that could be a workaround until the official one is done (more info at pixelfed.org/mobile-apps). But not something I've used so I can't really say how well it works! Also not sure if you can easily migrate your account from one server to another and keep all your followers. But hey, maybe this is your chance to find all this stuff out and report back to us. Be an explorer, have an adventure, see what happens! Worst case you just lost a bit of time on a platform you didn't end up using 🤷‍♀️

@@TheGiddyStitcher This is great, thanks! Exactly what I was looking for. Now I just need to check which of my crafty friends is using it already and if I can convince them to join too ;) I'll go on an adventure with the app but probably will use a PC based thing more (esp for typing).