I found it complicated at first (didn’t know which instance “will last”, where to register to not lose anything when instance admin decide to turn it down), but now it’s going good. We are missing mobile apps though.
What’s are your thoughts about Lemmy/kbin?
There is a younger project called Nostr, that came up as a twitter / mastodon replacement. It deals with user identities in better, more sustainable way. Thle client generates a keypair for you locally (you can back it up and use it to “log in” with any other client). Then you choose relay server (or even multiple relays) that will save and forward your posts to others.
Most of the client software resembles twitter UI, but there are some with more *chan/reddit like look.
Since the Nostr protocol is built primarily by people around bitcoin related projects, there is software ready for the relay operators to accept payments. Most of them are currently free, but thanks to bitcoin lightnong network, paying for a relay is pretty fast, and trustles.