Over the years, I’ve been studying a handful of different fediverse platforms that bring a lot of interesting concepts to the table.
As someone that has studied and reported on the developments of these various systems, I’ve decided to put together a summary of things I’d like to one day put into my own federated platform, should I ever develop enough brainpower to actually develop one.
I have exactly the same issue and brought up that topic a number of times on their forum. There are other factors than those you mention that keep me from diving deeper. But on the specification front things feel like they are getting more and more complex and seem to strive for “universal interoperability” (sort of a reinvention of the Semantic Web). The way they are positioned and their website has improved to what it was some time ago, though.
On Fediverse we go the opposite direction, where “ad-hoc interoperability” - apps creating extensions on-the-fly, introducing incompatibilities - make interop harder and harder, also increasing the complexity of deeper inter-app integrations. Interop gets to be on lowest common denominator (i.e. bolt on microblogging features) and the risk is that fedi innovation / evolution grinds to a halt, never tapping into its potential. Your great article, Sean, highlights many things that need good processes and people involved that coordinate beyond the scope of building individual stand-alone apps, i.e. at the “substrate” level.
PS. I started a Matrix chatroom Solidground yesterday to discuss some of these issues.