I found Firefish which is a better alternative to the standard Mastodon application. It's compatible with Mastodon and has better features. It allows users to create web pages and the character limit is 3,000 instead of the 500 on Mastodon. It feels like a good limit for the type of site that it is. Plus this means that it can handle long posts from users on customized Mastodon instances.
I didn’t enjoy firefish, it was buggy and seemed to have a lot of gatekeeping.
Agreed, I much prefer Mastodon over firefish. Firefish handles hashtags really strangely and (at least at the time I tried) wouldn’t allow you to even have followed hashtags show up in your timeline.
Well, that would be because following hashtags isn't a feature of Firefish. Antannae are a fundamentally different thing - they're saved searches.
Right, which is exactly what I said I didn’t like about it?
What do you mean by gatekeeping?
I noticed that the interface seemed a bit slow. I toggled and option to reduce animations so hopefully that improves things.
How does software have gatekeeping? Does a dialog box pop up and say "I'm sorry, you are not cool enough to use this app"?