I’ve enjoyed Pixelfed a lot more than I thought I would. I feel like the same principle applies to follow tags that you are interested in to make sure you feed has content that interests you. A lot of the same content surfaces on both my mastodon and Pixelfed accounts as I follow the same hashtags on both. I did discover a few accounts on Pixelfed that I wouldn’t have if I just stayed on Mastodon though.

My biggest gripes with Pixelfed is that the app sucks. And the content I’d be most interested in seeing (pictures of my friends and family) aren’t on there. Probably because of reason 1 and because meta platforms aren’t as a big of pain point for them as they are for me

Instances that don’t vet users sufficiently get defederated for spam. Users then leave for instances that don’t get blocked. If instances are too heavy handed in their moderation then users leave those instances for more open ones and the market of the fediverse will balance itself out to what the users want.