If you'd like to try running your own instance of Ecko, our community-driven Mastodon fork, or Acropolis, same for diaspora*, YunoHost is the easiest way.
You can install YunoHost on an old laptop, raspberry pi, virtual machine, or remote server and learn what it's like to self-host these apps or one of many others (CryptPad is another favorite as Google Docs replacement).
Have you already tried? I'd love to hear about your experience getting any of the above setup. What didn't make sense? What took a long time? How can we help make it smoother and easier to provide what your community needs?
@emacsen Great question and one that needs revisiting from time to time. The core difference is in development philosophy in that code addressing any valid problem gets merged.
Typically this question is more about features so probably best is to share a feature comparison: https://fediverse.town/t/what-features-should-a-community-driven-mastodon-fork-have/60
What is missing from that comparison is that we've made it possible to change many of the static settings (post length, # of poll options, minimium bio length, max profile fields) from the UI. We've recently added five more themes and today we merged markdown/html support.
If you want to test it out, c4.social is open for registration and it typically not far behind the latest commit.
@weex YunoHost worked great for me in installing Nextcloud and WriteFreely for testing! It takes so much of the pain out of installing & running online apps and it's making my life so much easier :)
@weex
What is the benefit of Ecko vs Mastodon?