Kbin: I liked the UI but I thought calling communities "magazines" was weird. Also, there were features that I felt unnecessary like "boost" or "microblog". Self-hosting documentation was much worse compared to Lemmy.
Squabbles: It took me a while to figure out the UI and honestly did not like it. The icon looks very funny as if it's mocking what the average user is supposed to look like. It also isn't decentralized.
Tildes: I liked the UI and the name. Not much to say other than that it's also not decentralized.
Discuit: The best UI out of the bunch. It's very easy to navigate. I wish it also had a naming community prefix like "!" or "m/" or "s/" or "~". Generally, it feels very Reddit-like but it's also not decentralized.
Lemmy: Very rough start but this and Kbin were really the only real options for me because they're both decentralized. It's gotten a lot better over the past month in terms of performance and UI. There's a lot of apps being developed for it too. Most of Lemmy's annoying quirks are its bugs but those are being fixed after every new release.
Yeah, !anime@ani.social doesn't have much activity because I realized that I didn't really want to compete with the already-established ones (!anime@lemmy.ml and !anime@lemmy.world) but I am working on adding other specific/niche communities like !evangelionmemes@ani.social and !animewallpapers@ani.social. I only plan to "start" them though and I want to let other people take over eventually because I couldn't take care of them all on top of the admin work for the instance.
I'm far from 30, am a tech enthusiast but I'm taking a degree in a different field, and I do use Linux.
But yeah, it's hard to get other people to use media platforms like this one. I think it will naturally grow though but it's hard to compete with corporate media platforms.
Belladonna of Sadness and maybe Angel's Egg.
I've seen weirder obscure experimental non-anime films I've forgotten the titles of. If I remember, I'll add it here.