If you want to watch the numbers yourself, FediDB (fedidb.org) and fediverse.observer list each software by number of servers and monthly active users. MAU is a fairer measure than total accounts, since lots of accounts are dead.

Roughly: Mastodon is by far the biggest, for microblogging. On the Reddit-style side you’re on now (people call it the “threadiverse”), Lemmy is the largest, with PieFed and Mbin as the main alternatives, and they all federate with each other, so you can follow the same communities from any of them. Misskey and its forks are also big, especially with Japanese users.

Since you’re learning: make an account on one and follow a person or community that lives on a different software. Seeing a Mastodon post show up here as a thread is the moment federation clicks.

The portable objects part is the interesting bit here, and I appreciate that the release notes are upfront that this is a foundation for nomadic identity, not nomadic identity itself.

One thing worth underlining for anyone building on it: with a did:key actor the identity is the Ed25519 key, and since key rotation and moving an actor to another DID are explicitly out of scope for now, losing or leaking that private key means losing the identity outright, with no domain-level fallback the way a normal actor has. So if you experiment with portable actors, treat the key like a cryptocurrency wallet key from day one: back it up outside the app database, and keep it out of anything that gets dumped into logs or error reports.

Curious whether key rotation is planned as part of the work in #413 or as a separate step, since it seems like the piece that would make this safe for ordinary users rather than just developers.

Building on rimu’s point about not running the feed query twice: for the community page specifically there’s a cheaper signal already available. The community response carries a cached post count, so a UI could compare that against what the listing actually returns over a time window and show a hint like “some posts here are hidden by your filters” without a second heavy query.

For the main feeds, even a non-counting version would help a lot: when a feed comes back short or empty, show a small line listing which filter types are currently active (“you have 3 instance blocks, language filter on, hide-read on”) with a link to each setting. That’s just user settings the client already has, no new API, and it answers most of the “why can’t I see X” support questions.