Hey folks, just discovered this thread thanks to @julian@activitypub.space 's mention above!
To be more accurate, I was in the Firefish core team, I started Catodon with another Firefish dev when Firefish was being abandoned, but that dev quickly lost interest. Since then (a couple of years ago now) I've been trying to work with a dev but had no luck. So yeah, I recently started experimenting with LLMs and it went much better than I expected - you have to be careful with some things, but it's doable.
So Catodon (which was first announced as a Firefish fork in 2023) finally had its first stable release in March, and I intend to continue working on it. It's based on Sharkey, but I've also ported some Firefish features, and so far I've added a Direct Messages chat-like page, an RSS timeline and a LOT more smaller features, and my next goal is implementing Lemmy/Piefed/NodeBB compatible forums (which I wanted to do -and had suggested- since I was in Firefish).
If you have any questions, I'll be happy to answer, and thank you for taking interest in my project! Hope to join the threadiverse with my main account very soon - the goal is within April.
@homes@piefed.world if you want to use Mastodon, you are very welcome to just do that. I never liked it, never used it, it always felt to me like an outdated Twitter. I respect everything they've accomplished, of course, but that doesn't mean I want to use the software :p
Misskey is probably the second biggest fedi microblogging platform, and has a very different approach, less strict, more fun, and with a much better looking interface. It also has emoji reactions, it has had quotes since forever (which Mastodon added very recently), there's a ton of things that are different, another one is that Mastodon has a 500 character/post limit while Catodon has 5000 etc.
There's wonderful ecosystem in fedi, and it would be a shame if we lost that pluralism and only use one or two platforms. Another thing that is obviously different (or will be very soon), is what is described in this topic. The reason that you made your post from a Piefed account, and not a Mastodon one =)