To those who have used both which do you prefer overall?
What has me on the fence with Sharkey is it seems overstuffed, and the vast majority of instances revolve around anime. I like anime, sure, but it’s 90% of the content.
The extra features seem rad but it looks like you need to use the PWA to access most of them and there are very few misskey sns supported clients available.
I jumped mastodon to Firefish.social to Calckey.world and now am about to jump again to Sharkey. All are misskey forks, but unfortunately there were technical/dev issues with the first two. Calckey.world is actually who told me I should be migrating now to Sharkey. I’m hoping Sharkey has a bit more staying power than the last two.
Having said that, how I have described them to others is - they pretty much (IMO) solve all or most of the problems that new users have when they say Mastodon has a confusing UI. I didn’t find Mastodon that bad, but the UI here is just a bit more polished, a bit more modern IMO, and I do like the extra features.
As others have pointed out, I wouldn’t get too hung up on how the instance is branded. Like most of the other fediverse tools you can kind of control your own expeience.