If, like me, you're increasingly anxious about the state of social media in 2025, you might be looking for a "way out", but not sure how to progress. Neither am I. There are so many platforms (ActivityPub, ATProtocol, Nostr, etc), and it's hard to know which will persist and which will eventually starve off.
We're going to be experimenting with some "fediverse" stacks during the remainder of February ("Fedi-ruary"), to gauge interest and response.
The first of these stacks is GoToSocial, a twitter-like microblogging platform, which functions like a lightweight instance of Mastodon. Since it uses ActivityPub, it's fully interoperable with all other Mastodon ("fediverse") instances, but it's ideally geared for running your own personal instance, rather than a huge community.
This is not for everyone - you'd need to manually put in the effort to find people to "follow" on different "instances", but if you're already fedi-curious, then it may be an interesting experiment. You can (and should) attach a custom domain to your GoToSocial instance, so that it's portable, and you can migrate it elsewhere later if you choose to.
Here's what a basic ElfHosted GoToSocial instance can look like (custom domain applied), and for feeling for the scale of the 'verse, here's George Takei's account, with close on 500K followers!
During February, we're basically testing the waters, so GoToSocial is a token $1/month, ongoing, if you subscribe before the end of the month.
Happy playing!