I'm experimenting with some alternatives. I prefer Rust (because I speak that) or Ruby (it's my main language) but the Go option gotosocial is my favorite.
It lacks a frontend and admin UI, so not ready for prime-time, i guess. But good enough to glue onto a pinafore frontend. And to manage a small instance.
The most promising rust alternative, rustodon, is ground to a halt, it seems. A lean, sinatra-based backend could work, but wouldn't solve the complexity of hosting caused by Ruby runtime and deps. That also doesn't exist to my knowledge.
I don’t have the bandwidth to contribute code to anything right now, but I hope one of those makes progress. GoToSocial looks promising, especially with their plan to be able to import (or possibly even run on top of) existing Mastodon databases.
I use pleroma, written in Elixir and hosting everything properly inside pg, for a personal instance and it just works. No magic knobs to turn, no significant delays.
It lacks a frontend and admin UI, so not ready for prime-time, i guess. But good enough to glue onto a pinafore frontend. And to manage a small instance.
The most promising rust alternative, rustodon, is ground to a halt, it seems. A lean, sinatra-based backend could work, but wouldn't solve the complexity of hosting caused by Ruby runtime and deps. That also doesn't exist to my knowledge.