With federation, there is no reason why you need to be crowding onto the most popular instance. If you find a much smaller instance and then just federate the communities that you want to it, then that's going to spread out the load of you as a user and everyone else as a user.
Besides being better for the individual instance operators who don't need to carry the load of the entire fediverse, decentralizing is better for the health of the fediverse. Imagine if two or three of the biggest instances went down today, how many people would be completely incapable of using Lemmy anymore?
This isn't big tech. Somebody is paying for this, and sometimes those people just decide that they don't want to pay for it anymore. Big instances do go down. So that being the case, decentralize. And that way even if a certain server is overloaded, you will be fine. And even if a certain server decides to go down, you will be fine. And you'll be doing what's right for the rest of the fediverse.
I can't say with certainty, but I'm pretty sure that it'll just find a way to gracefully degrade. The fact is that Mastodon is literally the elephant in the room, if you make your thing incompatible with it, you screwed up.
I use rebased which is another non mastodon back-end that supports many of the same features. I think that generally speaking you're not going to have to worry. Yes, your emotes won't show up on their post for them because Mastodon doesn't actually support that, but it'll show up as a like. If you use quote reposts then it'll just show up as a link to the original comment.
The nice thing about taking your shot is also that it causes the waveform to collapse.
There's a lot of people who end up just sitting there waiting for their moment with their crush, and they don't wait for days, they don't wait for weeks, they don't wait for months, they wait for years only to find out in the end that their crush didn't even remotely feel the same way.
Once you manage to collapse the waveform, usually you can move on and you're probably a pretty decent person, there's probably someone out there who would actually like you that you're not going to have to sit there in pine over.
I do pay for a couple subscriptions, but in the 2000s I had a subscription service for video games called GameTap and it was great except they could add and remove games on a whim and when you stop paying you lose access to all of it. So you need to remember a subscription service is ephemeral and there's long term benefits to having the files yourself.
I've been using invidious. There's an automatic install script that's perfect, except I'm using mint instead of straight ubuntu so I have to tweak the script a bit to use the ubuntu path.
Extended color basic on the COCO was amazing, and so when I moved to a Commodore 64 I was like "What the hell is this? Where's all the graphics commands?"
Running on a total of 5 fanless commercial grade sign PCs. That's why the motto of my websites is "this site runs of parts scavenged from a roadside sign"
1x core 2 duo running Lemmy
2x atom d2550s running xmpp, matrix, lotide, searx, nostr, and invidious
2x core i5 4000 series running everything else
I try to run bare metal so I can stick my fingers into things.
Decentralize.
With federation, there is no reason why you need to be crowding onto the most popular instance. If you find a much smaller instance and then just federate the communities that you want to it, then that's going to spread out the load of you as a user and everyone else as a user.
Besides being better for the individual instance operators who don't need to carry the load of the entire fediverse, decentralizing is better for the health of the fediverse. Imagine if two or three of the biggest instances went down today, how many people would be completely incapable of using Lemmy anymore?
This isn't big tech. Somebody is paying for this, and sometimes those people just decide that they don't want to pay for it anymore. Big instances do go down. So that being the case, decentralize. And that way even if a certain server is overloaded, you will be fine. And even if a certain server decides to go down, you will be fine. And you'll be doing what's right for the rest of the fediverse.