I've been on SSB for some 3 years (with some breaks when I had enough of npm). Once you're onboarded it works like a charm: exchange of data between peers works swiftly and efficiently, to the extend that you can even use it for realtime chat the way IRC works. The community is colourful and friendly, and the signal to noise ratio is high. I've learned a lot about fermentation and growing mushrooms and living off-grid while reading posts on SSB.

My biggest frustration has been that all usable clients are written in nodejs. I recently took a seven months break to cool off from rage over npm (and yarn, for that matter), but now I'm back again.

Onboarding can be tricky because there are no central servers — it's 100% p2p — but I guess it's easier these days than it was in the beginning. And if you know somebody who is already onboard it shouldn't pose a problem at all.

A better site to start with is probably https://scuttlebutt.nz/