TL/DR; c/pics and c/photography are the only places I share images.
Wow - that's quite the compliment for a dude who just likes to post holiday images. I don't post my pictures anywhere else, as I don't believe in letting Meta and others commercialize my photos or feed their AI monsters with it.
I like it here, I like the federation, I like that nobody restricts my upload size or compresses my images and I really like the vibe of the whole place and that I can just pay a buck a month to cover my costs instead of lots of ads and data scraping. Some months ago I thought c/pics is great but it could do with more content. So instead of complaining I started posting my own humble tries here, following the motto mediocre content is better than no content.
I'll take your question as encouragement and keep posting.
I tried that but found that it is still too unpopulated. The instances I found just had posts by the same five people. But I agree, the software is great, it just lacks an audience :)