If I wanted avatars, I'd be on Gaia online...

The defederation thing just led me to making accounts on different servers. Jerboa allows multiple accounts, so I just use the different instances to split the communities I subscribe to by theme. Science for mander.xyz, tech and dev on programming.dev... It keeps my front pages organized.

Absolutely. I'm on a few instances with different moods/themes, and I toggle between them depending on what I am interested in at the moment (sciences, programming and tech, ...).

It has already entirely replaced Reddit for me. It's much nicer here.