I have used both in the past, but now use neither of them, have been exclusively a KDE Plasma user for several years by now and no longer feel like trying much different.
GNOME 2 was the first DE I ever used on GNU/Linux, so MATE has a nostalgic feel to me. I do not think Xfce is very radically different from it in its functionality, although the default configuration is somewhat different. This is really mostly a matter of personal taste.
agreed, I don’t feel I’m missing out on anything here, although obviously I don’t know because I don’t have an account on another instance
although if I joined the threadiverse now I would join an instance that also supports following microblogs, i.e. a piefed or mbin instance, probably will do that if I ever have a reason to abandon this account