I found dealing with a mastodon server to be a pain in the ass. For a time I outsourced that to Masto.host and it was smooth. The owner of that site was really helpful and knew mastodon well
I’m leaning towards Immich at the moment if I can’t configure pixelfed to my liking. On the chat side of things that is sort of what we do now but I was wanting something a bit more asynchronous. With chat we can send photos, but what we were wanting is somewhere to just post stuff and other family can view it on their own time or go back and see a previous post. With chat it’s a bit too ephemeral for the grandmas and grandpas…they keep asking us to send the same photos because they cant find it in the chat history :/
Sorry about the multiple replies with the same content. My client app apparently decided to have a problem.