I am not very optimistic about Mastodon, particularly for these reasons:

- crappy inter-instance user discovery

A user won't show up in search or the federated timeline unless a local user follows them.

It basically makes it impossible to get discovered when using your own independent instance.

Even if you interact and reply to a user in instance B, you will still not show in instances B search or federated timeline.

I found this diagram to be helpful in explaining which users show in the federated timeline:

https://imgbox.com/V7rZ6i2q

- no way to see other instances timelines

This makes its even worse to discover accounts when launching your own server.

- no backfill for old toots[1-2]

This is just ridiculous.

But it seems to be where everyone technical is going, and since it's a federated protocol, If I am going to use it, it's going to be on my own server.

So far I have seen three main Recommendations for hosting Activity Pub

- Mastodon (obviously)

- Misskey

- Pleroma

My use case is a personal server, just for me.

I want something reliable, and easy to maintain, because figuring out how to migrate to another platform later-on isn't fun.

Which one do you recommend?

Misskey looks to be the most interesting one.

You can create lists, follow other instances local timelines, supports reactions, remove the character limit, etc. but Mobile app support is limited, PWA is the only option.

But I don't want to end up using something unpopular, where the development is going to be rather sparse.

1. https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/14017

2. https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/34