My first foray into fediverse was Diaspora freaking ages ago (can't even remember when, but I was still on Facebook at he time so long time x_x), and I eventually deleted my account on the server that I was on to free up the resources for someone else as I slowly stopped using it.
The second attempt very shortly after that was Friendica which was so very much more feature rich but at the time I was playing around with it, struggling to take off. I hope they're doing better now.
A friend recently really, really tried very hard to get me onto Mastodon knowing that I would probably be interested because I was into all that decentralisation nonsense (she also playfully blamed me for the reason she had started getting crypto ads recently XD as far as I know she has never looked at crypto stuff but she knows I do and we interact almost daily) but I still haven't because I struggle to do anything shorter than an epic.
Sometimes I feel like I should give it a go or get back on Diaspora or see how Friendica is going, but I can barely keep up with here as is.
Then I checked literally just then and there is a Mastodon integration for Nextcloud (which by the way has Hub which I kind of want to try out but I don't have anything worth trying it out with, and the self-hosted version which I have has probably most if not all of the same stuff and I realised that it can do the same decentralised socnetty thing too).
More to think about because I don't have enough to think about already x_x
I hope this stuff keeps spreading like an uncontrollable wildfire and very violently upends the centralised things.
Me too!
I love that everyone working on ActivityPub projects seems to be motivated by building cool decentralized stuff and not just unimaginable profits or dominating market shares. I do think if the Friendicas of the world had gotten the right level of interest early on then there would have been no space for these centralized monsters... but we are where we are and all we can do is fight back and make the internet what we want it to be... for future generations if not for us.
Friendica happened around the same time G+ did, and even had more and better features that G+ did at the time. I vaguely remember a conversation with the lead on Friendica that they had no idea what the "wow" factor was or how to get it, as the product was pretty solid and reasonably well polished (it was still under heavy development at the time I looked) but when a friend of theirs was testing it, they were very positive about it, but when that friend got onto G+ they were raving.
And I think that's what a lot of places even like hive and its various hydra front ends probably struggle with.
Yeah, the Hive blockchain is absolutely incredible... but it definitely lacks that wow amazing feature that gets people so excited for a shiny new thing.