I tried Hubzilla, Akkoma, and Mastodon. I still use Mastodon. I have the ActivityPub plugin on a Wordpress site, but haven't yet migrated that site's Mastodon account because Wordpress doesn't offer a great experience for consuming content from accounts I follow. I may try out Wafrn.

I've always had mixed feelings about the microblogging category. Low friction to post and interact is good. Character limits and a complete lack of formatting, not so much. I set the character limit on my self-hosted Mastodon instance to a big number I never approach; I routinely exceed the default 500.

I was aware of Lemmy for a while, but didn't join until the Reddit API fiasco because most of the activity was weird political extremism until suddenly a ton of people wanted Reddit alternatives and new servers sprang up.