"I joined Pixelfed and my first post was set to Public but minute or two later it was set to Unlisted, what's going on?"

You trigged our anti-spam detection system, don't fret though!

Your post is awaiting review by a human admin who can mark it as not spam and restore the Public visibility!

Not all  servers have the anti-spam service enabled, those that do use it to keep the public timeline free from spam.

It isn't personal, unless you're a spammer ❤️ #pixelfed #spreadTheWord

Some people think Mastodon is too weird to become popular:

I joined Twitter in 2008. We had to put a "d" in front of a tweet to convert it to a direct message and every other day you had some embarrassing private moments exposed because someone forgot about the “d”. Hashtags were just a community hack, introduced by Chris Messina to somehow tag content. Search? Hah, you wish! Tweets via SMS were supposed to be a thing. Oh, and the daily meet and greet with the failwhale. Totally not weird.