(Skip to the final paragraph if you don’t care about the details)

Greetings. I want to start by saying I’m new to both lemmy and the fediverse in general.

I started with mastodon because the concept was familiar and I found an instance I like. I’ve made some aquaintances there and have since been testing the waters on diaspora and friendica as well.

Generally I’m having fun but things are also very diluted with this approach. Especially when there’s some redundancy in the protocols used, so I’d like to narrow things down in the future. I don’t really have any special needs in terms of creating content or accumulating followers. For the most part I’m just looking to hang out and be social without being surveilled by advertisers.

I understand the protocols well enough to know the implications of choosing one over another, but the more I try and think about it objectively the more I overthink it, hence this novel.

Finally getting to my questions, how did you deal with the number of options available? Did you pick a platform and stick with it or is there some merit to the “try everything” approach? I understand that this might be pretty subjective and I’m really not looking for specific advice on exactly which platform to choose, however any opinions from those more experienced than me would be appreciated.