Good catch, I've corrected my oversight.

When Google+ shut,.I moved to diaspora and didn't do very much with it.

When the great Twitter exodus happened, I signed up to Mastodon and didn't get this federated business so wandered off.

Now with the API apocalypse at Reddit, I am here and I get it. It now all makes sense to me and I've been seeing how federated I can get, which is the background to ye research that went into the initial post. And the answer is "pretty federated" as everything is playing nicely with each other. In fact, I am feeling borderline evangelical as this feels like the Internet I've been waiting for since the late 80s/early 90. So let's skip Web 3.0 and move on to 4.0 where everything is federated!

but the fedi software is not just that

Indeed. This is, at best, scratching the surface. My aim was to create a list that ticked most of these boxes:

• Alternatives to existing services - this is a question that comes up often so I thought there might as well be a list of the popular ones.
• Relatively well developed and simple to use.
• Has a user-friendly website that makes it easy for ordinary users to jump onboard (why Hubzilla didn't make the list)

Granted, all of these list above is not straightforward to use, but can you add that on advanced category.

That's where posts like yours come in useful - my list is just the easy on-ramp and then people can add in great resources like that which help people push on and do more. It's kind of where I'll be going next in my journey, so I am grateful for the post. If you, or anyone else, have more advanced services them keep them coming.

Yeah, from what I've read, it sounds like an easier concept for new users to get their head around (and so is definitely an option to throw into the ring) but it isn't part of the Fediverse. Not sure if that means it could just get bought up by one of the big conglemerates.

I'd love to hear your feedback as it looks like an interesting Twitch alternative. I didn't include it on the list as it doesn't look to be as straightforward to get streaming on it compared to the set-up of others on the list.

I also was on diaspora, it was cool for a while actually, not a ton of users but quite a bit of activity. Seemed to dry up though and seems like they were having spam and technical problems. Any idea what it's like today?

Yeah, I went to diaspora after Google+ was shut down but didn't end up doing very much on there.

Doing the research has made we want to go and dust off the old account, if I can find it. However, I might sign up with Friendica for a new start. Probably look into that this weekend.