Remy Rose

That’s where I’m at, nice place!

I’m not sure about overall activity, but I do know my feed is active enough that i can’t read ALL of it unless I spend like an hour or more per day on here, and that’s plenty active for me.

I migrated to the flagship PieFed instance a while ago and haven’t regretted it at all. This place rocks! I would love it if there was an app though, not a big fan of PWAs lol. If I was smarter, I’d try to make one myself. Very exciting to see more instances popping up!

I assumed, by “They are not being as used as I expected/hoped.”, that the OP was implying, "- by the members of said instances". And that the closed-registration bit was part of the proposal, not the existing state of affairs. I didn’t realize their instances were already closed-registration.

Ah, I see. I misread a bit. I thought they were being used differently than expected, not less than expected.

I don’t run any instances, but that does seem potentially like a pretty neat idea.

I am really curious about the unexpected behaviors of your instance members though! What are they doing, just treating it as a general instance and not really engaging with the local theme?

Mirlo.space is working on federation too. I think they’re not as far along in that regard, but further along in terms of being a bandcamp replacement? Last I heard, anyway. I buy stuff from there, payment works.

A lot of public libraries offer access to ReferenceUSA through your library card. I vaguely remember that queries are pretty customizable on there, and exportable to various formats. Despite the generic name, it’s specifically for businesses. Would that work?

I can’t say that the ability to follow individual people is really something I care about, but coming from Piefed, it does seem to work just fine. So does Peertube and any of the other ones I’ve bothered to try.