If you just want to join an instance, it doesn’t really matter if they are running Mastodon, Pleroma (or one of the forks), you will be able to follow and interact with everyone else on the microblog portion of the Fediverse. In fact from a Kbin instance you can do Lemmy communities and Mastodon microblogging from the same platform (Kbin calls communities Magazines and in the magazines are Threads, and they call the mastodon-like portion is just called microblog).

If you want to self-host your own instance, then you need to pay attention to the difference in the platfoms, Pleroma is lighter, Mastodon is more modular, and there are many forks of both each with their own strenghts and weakenesses.

If you don’t like the frontend, you can use Elk, or Soapbox, or some others out there, as well as all the apps and PWAs for either platform, most are compatible with both.

Dell had a Linux line some years ago where everything worked out of the box, never got the popularity needed to keep it alive.

System76 has Pop!_OS so that they can provide great out of the box experience with their computers, but they are not as big as other vendors.

A good way to really get a product like that to mass market is to make it available in general stores (Walmart, Best Buy, Etc.), the problem is that most of those customers will not understand why their system is so different and they cannot install that MS Office 2003 they have always used, or that Norton Antivirus that their cousin’s son recommended to them 10 years ago that was working fine on their old computer.

And then you have the younger generations that use every other device but a computer. They’d rather do all their school and college work on their phones and tablets rather than open a laptop, if they even know how to use a computer (you’d be surprised how many don’t even know how to use a computer).

Yeah, it’s not SSO, that’s why I wrote “of sorts”, but the post is precisely of how Pixelfed will now allow Mastodon users to log into a Pixelfed instance with their Mastodon account, meaning they will not see the current view of pixelfed as looked from a Mastodon interface but should look as if the user had a pixelfed account, since they are using the pixelfed interface.

It’s not released yet, so I have not tested it, but hopefully soon.

You can view Pixelfed from Mastodon, but the interface of Mastodon is more focused on text microblogging than on image sharing. By federating the logins they are kind-of making an SSO of sorts, so now you can use the full pixelfed interface but your suscriptions and history stay on your Mastodon instance and just federate over to the pixelfed instance you are login into.

That’s how people new to the fediverse were expeting it to work (myself included when I joined last year), so it’s nice to see it starting to shift that way.

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Very cool! Thanks!
Suggestion: add Brave Search (search.brave.com) as an option as well. It’s a smaller search engine but they have their own index and does not track users.

@ono there are relay services to help with that. I am going that route.

@ernest Yunohost was a great suggestion, installing it right now in a brand new VM. I’ll play with a lot of the applications and see which ones I like best. Thanks for that I wasn’t even aware of it.

I hope Kbin makes it there soon too. I like this interface better than Lemmy as a reddit replacement.

@Trekman10 I get that, but it seems it federates with Mastodon, Lemmy, Diaspora, Peertube and many other platforms, kind of having one account to rule them all… LOL

@ernest Thanks for the feedback! I’ve been reading and learning a lot. I am starting to get a better grasp of the Fediverse. Will definitely be playing soon with selfhosting an instance or two for myself and family.

@GeekyOnion Thanks! That’s really helpful!

On this topic, I now stumbled upon Friendica, it seems it can federate with pretty much everything else, not sure about the Facebook kind of UI, but there seem to be different templates.

Anyone has experience with it? Pros or cons?

@vibrantleaf Thanks! Just the kinds of info I was looking for.

@Trekman10 not sure on kbin but I don’t think so. On lemmy it’s not possible for sure. But that’s why I want to begin now, I only have a few comments on each, and this is my first post. I was part of the twitter and now reddit migrations.