I found Firefish which is a better alternative to the standard Mastodon application. It's compatible with Mastodon and has better features. It allows users to create web pages and the character limit is 3,000 instead of the 500 on Mastodon. It feels like a good limit for the type of site that it is. Plus this means that it can handle long posts from users on customized Mastodon instances.
You assumed well. I'm in a Firefish instance and the most content I can see from there comes from Mastodon users from other instances.
Don't missunderstand me. I think that is pretty cool because you can interact with both Mastodon and Firefish users using any of the two applications, but at least in case of my Firefish instance, most of the additional features of Firefish are underutilized.