Oh that's cute! These things never look quite right while they're in progress but I'm sure it'll all come together 😄

😲 You've been holding out on us! That's amazing progress well done, absolutely gorgeous colour you've gone with too. Yay, sock gang!

Thanks! The yarn is just Stylecraft Special XL, Stylecraft being one of the widely-available cheaper brands in the UK. I'm not sure how widespread it is in other countries, or where you are, but if you're here it's their Bottle colourway and it's stunning.

As far as Mastodon goes. I never did Twitter either, partially like you because of the drama, partially just because I didn't see the point and prefer longer discussions. But I've got two active accounts over there (this is my craft one) and honestly love both it and Lemmy very much. I tend to use Mastodon more for stream of consciousness stuff, Lemmy more for open-ended questions and discussion, and then cross-post my craft projects to both because it's fun getting comments from both platforms in one thread and having my friends from each one interact with each other. This Lemmy post for example was actually a Mastodon toot, which is pretty neat.

Plus of course cross-posting like that gets more action for the less-busy platform, it's weird because craft-wise knitting is waaaaay more popular on Mastodon. But cross stitch gets more interaction on Lemmy. So I just send posts to both to cover all my bases 🤷‍♀️

Mastodon discoverability runs on hashtags. To get an idea if there's much action on there for your niche I would visit mastodon.social (it's the biggest instance and therefore has most content federated) and search for likely tags, see what comes up. There's a thriving craft community there, and also a big gamedev community, which are the focuses of my two accounts. But I have heard it's not quite as good for certain topics, so really depends what you're looking for.

If you do decide to give it a go, like all Fediverse things it's picking an instance that tends to be the hard part. But unlike Lemmy you can migrate account every 30 days and all your followers come with you, so a bad choice at the start isn't really a big deal.

Hope something in this wall of text was helpful! 😅

Oh look at you getting all Fediverse-fancy and joining the Lemmy version 😉

I've done the half-hearted "put your head through the neck hole and see" try-on method and it's hard to tell before the sides are seamed but I was surprisingly pleased with it at that stage!

You know, I'm not sure I've ever seen anyone using alpaca for socks before. Does it hold up as well as a typical sock yarn with nylon etc? Or are they more just intended as house socks? I'm so intrigued!

My favourite crochet cardigan is Stylecraft Special too, they really have fantastic colours and the yarn is surprisingly long-lasting for one of the "cheap" brands.