If you don’t mind a learning curve and having to use the Web interface (because there’s no native mobile app): (streams). From Friendica’s creator.

If (streams) sounds good, but you need a shit-ton of extra features on top (and be it diaspora* connectivity), and you don’t mind an even steeper learning curve: Hubzilla. Also made by the guy who made Friendica.

If you absolutely, absolutely, absolutely must have a dedicated native app on your phone, you’re on Android, and you can live without features such as nomadic identity, multiple channels per account and advanced, fine-grained permission control: Friendica.

If you absolutely, absolutely, absolutely must have a dedicated native app on your phone, but you’re on iOS: Wait for Relatica to have a stable release, then Friendica. (Caveats see above.)

Forget diaspora*. It’s fading out. Shortly before New Year’s Eve, a bunch of big diaspora* pods shut down, and at least according to one stats site, diaspora* lost more than haf its users.

And Pleroma is a Twitter replacement that, just like Mastodon, started out as an alternative UI for GNU social.

I’m going to tell you my core problem, just to get some feedback/vent a little: i’ve wanted to end my Facebook account since Cambridge Analytica. I hate the feed. But Facebook has one key thing keeping me locked in at the moment - Events.

Back in the pre and early Facebook stages, there were websites that had well-curated, broadish event calendars for my city. These are now universally dead. Websites dedicated to the local music scene? Also pretty much dead (RIP punkottawa.com). Some have tried to get something going independently in later stages, but all have failed. Even my favourite college radio station, which has folks super tied into the community and local music scene and plug stuff on the air frequently, has pretty much abandoned their community events calendar. The problem gets worse if I’m travelling outside of the city, in that I have no clue where to even start looking effectively outside of Facebook (@ me, Montrealers and Torontonians in particular). Stuff like bandsintown is ok, but misses a lot when you’re more into bar gigs than concerts

I’ve yet to find a non-Facebook approach that captures events I’d be interested in that doesn’t miss something. RSS feeds from websites for known gig spaces (either natively or with a web2rss thing) can get part of the way there, but there’s been cases of stuff happening at new/unexpected venues (a hot sauce store here, at some point, became a gig venue) that I’ve only found out about via Facebook. And this ignoring non-music related stuff that occasionally comes up serendipitously.

I’ve yet to come up with a great solution, and that kinda ticks me off.