I've gone looking for a few diaspora threads ... it seemed very very quiet over there (from what I saw, maybe I didn't find where people are). Like, if you want to feel better about lemmy being on the small side ... go check out diaspora.

What do you mean by specifications?

This was a few years back, and my memory isn't that great, but from I recall : Diaspora had a rather privileged childhood, in the form of a very successul kickstarter. And they basically were the cool kids back then, and as such they didn't follow any existing protocol (which, at that time, would have been either OStatus or XMPP, basically) and went their own way. Federation at that time wasn't that much of a hype, but still they (rightfully) felt it would be great to document their protocol, and they published (some sort of) specification.

At the same time, Friendica's author (which then went to built several other socialnetworking tools/platforms, as RedMatrix, Huzbilla, Zap, Zot, ...) spent some time trying to federate his tools (can't remember if it was Friendica or RedMatrix) with Diaspora. And was appalled by how unusable the specification was. From what I understood, at least.

@spitz@lemmy.ml ... continuing the other interesting fedi platforms thread.

plus one for firefish (and related platforms, namely misskey and iceshrimp (?, a recent fork of firefish)) ... basically the answer to what if microblogging were richer, more interesting, more featurefull, more fun, nicer looking, not so much *micro-*blogging and not at all concerned with being a twitter clone.

Akkoma (and its predecessor/older fork pleroma) are maybe worth checking out, though they're more popular amongst self-hosters and for good technical reasons it seems.

Friendica is the fedi alternative to facebook. I generally don't hear good things about it, but it's still actively developed and seems to have an active and dedicated (albeit small) user base. Hubzilla/Streams (developed by the same founding dev of friendica) are in a similar position AFAICT.

In case you didn't know ... kbin is a sort of alternative to lemmy, where it has very very similar community functionality but with some features that integrate more with the microblogging platforms.

Otherwise, you've got Pixelfed, an instagram-like alternative, popular and actively developed, and the sort of blogging tools/alternatives I don't too know much about: writefreely, micro.blog, the fediverse wordpress plugin, and microblog.pub (niche self-hosting platform).

The Fedidb Software page is probably a good guide to what's out there and what people are using.