Have you tried it? It's in open beta. The app is already really good. I don't think it's ready for the friends and fam yet but it's worth checking out.
I think that there's a lot more on PeerTube than it seems because discoverability is so terrible. I can't confirm that, though, because I can't find any of it.
Maybe something like FediSearch will make it more useful?
That doesn't really seem that bad, but Dan's New Year's resolution really ought to be not posting while drinking. Every time something like that happens, it's invariably 3am local time and he's been smoking weed and having a few drinks. It's not a great look for him or his projects. No one's at their best drunk at 3am.
It does have stories but they aren't supported on the apps yet and don't have the editing function that IG does. It doesn't have the "close friends" thing though.
It's kind of misleading to express it in number of backers. How much is it? Is it 400 people donating $100 each? It could be a lot!
The lowest tier on his Patreon is $1.50. He was getting about $1200/mo. which is used for all of his projects.
Who can believe that he wasn't able to meet his lofty goals with $1200 (Canadian!) while working entirely in the downtime from his unrelated full-time job?
Pixelfed just passed Lemmy and is now the 4th largest server software by user count. By MAU, it's the 2nd largest and is about 25% the size of Mastodon. Do you know what Mastodon pulls in every month? Based on their most recent financial report, about $40,000. They're 4 times the size but getting nearly 40 times the amount in donations.
Do you know how much Stux pulls in every month for running mstdn.social (and a couple other things)? Almost $4000/mo.
Not in any way associated with Pixelfed but there are lots of ways to show support. You definitely don't need to donate cash you need for living. Support fckreddit!
I don't think that it can just be declared satisfied, though. I imagine Google and Apple's obscenely top-shelf representation will be like, "this has about this much legal merit":
Twitter. With a little google drive thrown into the mix. Plus simple custom algorithmic feeds. And some kooky animation stuff.