The decentralized Instagram alternative is a great option if you want to back up your feed, focus on photo-sharing, or cut loose from Meta's empire entirely. And making the leap is surprisingly easy.
My personal observation is that people have been fed up for quite a while, not so much by the Instagram app itself but by Meta's brand, their untrustworthiness and the general vapid and scammy nature of the hordes of Influencers and "hustlers". It's just regular folks aren't aware of decent alternatives or the alternatives aren't quite there yet.
I think lemmy and it's growth is the biggest step forward in the direction of the fediverse becoming "mainstream" alongside twitters implosion
As this platform specifically develops more and the front end UI improves in spite of its current flaws, I feel like lemmy and kbin are probably the most likely to be picked up by the general public as it is the easiest to navigate and populate with content. You can federate whole communities in with tons of content, instead of just individual users. There are quirks but I think it has the most potential, it's like the fediverse was made for this kind of platform in mind specifically.
Not everything needs to be mainstream to be great. Sometimes being less known is what makes sites great since you are sure that the user base that is on there are there because of similar reason. Unlike mainstream apps where users trend to be there only because it is hip to be there but don't care for what the sites actually stands for. Hence the proliferation of garbage material in large mainstream sites.
It's a platform still in its infancy but improving rapidly, social.photo is a pretty good one if you want a smaller instance, it's hosted by the admin over at discuss.online. I'm not a member of discuss.online but I can vouch that @jgrim@discuss.online is an awesome sysadmin and I have full faith in him maintaining that instance long term (if you're ever worried of signing up to a small instance and it disappearing.. I highly doubt his stuff will.). Currently migration isn't added into pixelfed yet (its being worked on though) but I am gonna sign up to that one anyway, it's always best to spread around the federation.
Might be worth reaching out to lemmy.ca admins though and seeing if they have one spun up or would be willing to as well.
In fact, I had planned to build something many years ago and I’ll probably start on it now. It will provide a unique experience once it’s done in a several months. I’m working on some other stuff first… like myself.