Most of Japanese users are on Misskey, and most of instances never reports active or total users publicly due to privacy, but you can check its statistics on about page.

A lot of users even private their following/follower lists.

Like misskey.io have 700 thousands+ users with daily user visits around 15K+

This project is not “Nextcloud” only. There are eight vendors competing on Nextcloud also contributing.

USAmerica is just corrupt country that non-profit is just a way to avoid taxes.

Most of parts of the world won’t let non-profit to be turned that way.

One thing that I forgot: Misskey has feature of instance-only post, which means a lot of people post won’t federate.

You don’t get local Japanese feed, which is the best way to randomly find new interesting things.

In general, even if you’re on Mastodon, Pleroma, or other fediverse instance, you can interact with Misskey.

The reason why Japanese content rarely be seen on Western fediverse is due to blocking. A lot of Western instance blocks misskey.io, oekakiskey, etc. Remind you that Misskey.io has the second biggest activities on fediverse. Basically incompatibility of rules. One allows R18+ drawn content, others are not.

There English Japanese-centric instance that federate with japanese instance normally and still federate with Western fediverse. Sakurajima.social (Mastodon) and Sakurajima.moe (Sharkey) would be a good candidate.

They can federate as intended.

The question is the community. Most of Sharkey instance are English or other European languages.

Misskey. It’s not exactly niche, but it has a lot of cool features.

For example:

• Drive features to reuse your image or other media.
• Misskey games, so far only have Bubble Game and Go.
• Groups
• Antenna, basically subscription for any post with your set of rules.
• Playful profile decoration, similiar to Discord/Steam.