Mastodon. Lemmy is good for discussions, but Mastodon is more Twitter -like so you can follow friends and see what they’re up to.

In addition to Mastodon and Pixelfed, I have a Friendica, Hubzilla, Yacy, and Nextcloud.

Federated Services

Federated Services are services which many instances form a network to provide a greater whole than the sum of their parts, each participant in the Fediverse is an “instance”. A message or other item made available on one instance is visible and available on other instances.

We make these services available to all people who do not abuse it in order to promote the values of Free Speech, and those of the United States Constitution First Amendment. A free republic is not possible without free speech and commercial mainstream media do not provide it. We also get some advertisement benefit from hosting these, it is our hope that people who see how fast and responsible our services are will decide to do hosting or use other paid services here.

There are numerous federated services available, we offer Macrobloging platform Friendica, Hubzilla; Microbloging services Mastodon, Misskey, a federated search engine, Yacy, and a federated cloud service, Nextcloud.

Macrobloging services are message systems that allow long form posts similar in format to Facebook. These allow for works of fiction, poetry, technical papers, news items, short stories, and more. These formats are most useful for discussion of social issues.

Microbloging services allow only short form posts similar in format to Twitter. While you can link to larger articles elsewhere, you have a relatively short character limit and so can not post them directly.

Censorship, is handled much different on the fediverse than on mainstream media like Twitter or Facebook. On the fediverse, each individual instance is responsible for content available on that instance, but does not censor the rest of the network. Thus if you find the rules of one instance too constraining you can move to another.

Federated search engines are analogous to federated message systems in that each instance chooses what portion of the internet it wants to crawl. When you enter a search term, the local instance queries all of the federated instances, collates and sorts the results and presents them to you. As with messages, each instance can have it’s own censorship policies but no one instance can censor the entire network.

Given the wild-west nature of the fediverse, it is probably not suitable for children under 14, and you’re guaranteed to find some material that will offend virtually everyone. With federated search engines, material that is inappropriate will usually be flagged sensitive or nsfw (not safe for work) so as long as you don’t expand material marked as such, you can avoid this sort of material. There are occasionally people who violate these rules, we do our best to remove such individuals none the less some will get through.

We offer the following federated services:

Friendica.Eskimo.Com
Friendica is a decentralized long format macrobloging message network. It is similar in format to facebook however there is no centralized censorship. Also, it is able to federate with all other federated message systems which use ActivityPub protocol and also we have extensions that allow it to speak to several other networks via other protocols.

Hubzilla.Eskimo.Com
Hubzilla is similar in message format to Friendica in that it allows long posts. However, it specializes in it’s ability to provide connectivity to multiple protocols and so we include it in our mix of federated services primarily for the better connectivity it offers. Hubzilla provides a great deal of interoperability between many networks though ActivityPub is still it’s primary protocol. Hubzilla gives you a greater degree of control over privacy than some of the other networks. You can create private channels that are served between hubzilla instances and other compatible instances.

Mastodon.Eskimo.Com
Mastodon is first and foremost an alternative to Twitter. While Twitter has Tweets, Mastodon has Toots. The format is very similar. Mastodon toots have a limit of 500 characters. Similar to the short limit of Twitter. This is why this platform is referred to as a Microbloging format. Mastodon interacts with other ActivityPub instances however when a long form blog post from another instance arrives, you are only shown a short portion with a link to follow to see the full post on the originating site.

NextCloud.Eskimo.Com
If you are a customer of Eskimo North, your login credentials will work without a domain extension to access Nextcloud. If you are not a customer you can apply for a Nextcloud account using your choice of login and password, in this case the login should include your originating network. Some features require an Eskimo North shell account to take full advantage of.

Pixelfed.Eskimo.Com
Pixelfed is a federated pixel gallery. A place where you can share your photos to the widest audience possible, and you can view what others have shared. Instance is new as of April 6th, 2025.

Yacy.Eskimo.Com
Yacy is a federated search engine. There are several thousand instances on the Internet. Each instances crawls whatever portion of the web the administrator requested. It is also possible for the administrator of a site with relatively few resources to request a larger site to do crawls on their behalf. Unfortunately, it does not provide a method for an end user to initiate a crawl, but if you send e-mail to [email protected] and request a crawl, we will initiate a crawl on your behalf.

If you enjoy these services, please consider supporting us by taking advantage of our paid services: https://www.eskimo.com/

Besides lemmy only pixelfed

In times past, when it was still thriving, I was an avid user of Usenet.

I use Lemmy and PeerTube. Host a version of both myself. I use Loops a little as well and will probably pick up Pixelfed at some point.

I use Mastodon and Goblin

Mastodon, Lemmy, Peertube, Pixelfed. Soon, Owncast.

Matrix, XMPP, Mastodon, Lemmy,

Maybe make onboarding easier or the fediverse dies a slow death

But nah, why bother making it easy for users to join when you can just gatekeep everything into low engagement

Mastodon and Sharkey (Misskey fork), though I use Sharkey much less.

I also have a Matrix account which is a different kind of Federated service (chat and instant messaging) though not Federated in the same way as Lemmy and Mastodon (uses a different federation protocol).

Misskey, as most of East Asian and SEA community are on there.

Mastodon is my go-to “shout in the void about my goings-on” platform.

Pixelfed is where I post my original photography and artwork.

Bookwyrm is for my book nerdery, mostly.

Edit: Oh and I have a Matrix account but despite the fact that I mentioned it to literally all of my friends, nobody uses it. I keep it around in case someone actually wants to send me private messages because Mastodon is kinda badly suited for that.

Nah that kind of thing isn’t important to me unless the product is polished and as good as the original it’s replacing including the amount of content available

Mastodon. It’s much better than Lemmy.

Mastodon, but I’ve largely dropped it for Bluesky. I’m no purist about full decentralization, and I think it’s enough that the latter both has users, and isn’t currently awful.

I’ve used Bookwyrm a bit. I kinda like it. But it had some UX issues imo, and didn’t keep me hooked.

Also tried Pixelfed. It’s pretty slick, but I just can’t see the point. Like Instagram, seeing a feed of just pictures wasn’t all that interesting to me… though I probably just haven’t followed the right accounts.