I found Firefish which is a better alternative to the standard Mastodon application. It’s compatible with Mastodon and has better features. It allows users to create web pages and the character limit is 3,000 instead of the 500 on Mastodon. It feels like a good limit for the type of site that it is. Plus this means that it can handle long posts from users on customized Mastodon instances.
I recently moved from mastodon to firefish because of the “better” features, but I’ve been pretty disappointed so far. I don’t know how much of this is just the instance I’m on, but its actually missing some of the features I like the most about mastodon.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I can’t seem to mute/block instances, just users. I also can’t keep personal notes on a user’s profile (I loved this feature on my mastodon instance, I think every platform should have it). It’s nice being able to mute users for specific lengths of time, but less nice that I can’t choose to mute them on my timeline without muting them in my notifications. I also seem to have less control over my filters - on mastodon I could make a filter, provide a list of key words and hastags for it, and then have separate settings on which parts they applied to - whether it should also filter out replies to posts, or hide people’s profiles that mention them. iirc the only option I have on firefish is to make the filtered posts disappear completely or hide them behind a warning. These are the ones that affect me the most but I’ve also seen people mention that they can’t follow hashtags. I never did this but it seems like the people that did really appreciated it, so a bit of a bummer there too.
I don’t really want to migrate again, but if I did I would move back to mastodon rather than another firefish instance. It doesn’t “have better features”, they’re just a different set of features. If those are valuable to you, then great! Unfortunately I don’t care anywhere near as much about the features firefish added compared to the ones I lost.