Yeah this is the issue I have. I wouldn’t even be on instagram if it my friends weren’t on it. Pixelfed has a much tougher road to snatch users than a place like Lemmy or even Mastodon for that reason. If everyone I know hopped over with me (which let’s be real, I would never be able to get everyone to do that because they would run into the same issue with their own friend networks) then i’d gladly move over.
I have to be honest, the fact we have an active alternative(s) to reddit at last makes this a complete success for me. I’ve lowkey despised reddit for years. Particularly from 2016 on when bots kind of overran the website and the front page was just filled with toxic garbage that never really went away to this day. I actually did use the revanced patch to get my RIF app working again (though I can’t get my ad-less premium back unfortunately), but I’ve been on here far more than there. I think im just having more fun on Lemmy than I have been on reddit in years. The only reasons I hop back are for sports team specific communities (and really the game threads because I like interacting with other people watching when im watching alone). On the instance i’m on currently there are generated game threads but it hasn’t got the users to make them particularly active as of yet. If that ever happens i’ll happily cut off reddit for good
It takes some adjustment. I was gonna keep reddit but I ended up deleting it and all the apps. I’d love to say it was because of Lemmy but I think his whole saga showed me how addicted I was getting to the platform and that it was better to cut bait for good. I did the same with Twitter as well (or deactivated it, for some reason they don’t let you straight up delete it right away)
Between the rss feed I have set up, Lemmy, and my insta, discord and text groups I think I’m pretty satisfied. I get all my news and content with far less algorithm shenanigans, low effort spam and rage baiting.
I’m just dumb and forget the world wide web is, well, world wide haha. I just live in my own little bubble sometimes but i’m trying to be better about not blindly assuming the folks i interact with on here and other places are from the US