Not gonna lie, the article is right in the sense that the Fediverse is still rough on the edges. Hopefully the fact that everyone and their parents had to move out of most social media will make organizations reconsider investing government money into making them better.

What the article doesn’t mention is just how much time the Fediverse has spent in its infancy, because the drive wasn’t there for certain stuff and people only worked on what they cared to work on. Grassroots development, compared to the FB social graph and whatnot, which had paid employees working on it every day, while Jim spent his weekends in his basement tinlering with ActivityPub or OStatus.

As much as I try to sympathise with the author, he seems to suffer from a terminal case of Twitter-brain, where we all comment on the current-thing until we beat it into the ground and then find another current-thing to dissect to death. Some of us like to separate interest and usernames, without setting up a data mineable online profile. And what’s with Disord being touted as an alternative? It is ok for coordinating and communicating with your gaming buddies, but completely unusable for any forum acivity.

see, the thing that bothers me the most about articles like this is the pessimism and entitlement that comes with comparisons whining that platforms like Mastodon and Lemmy aren’t as mature and featureful as 15-20+ year-old, multi-billion-dollar platforms like reddit and twitter. like “how dare they not satisfy my every desire immediately!” these article also never another to mention that they’re only a few years old, both reddit and twitter were pretty basic when they were very young, and that mastadon and lemmy are developed by (mostly) community volunteers, are open-source, and, oh, yeah, totally free.

and what do they promote as alternatives? the same damned companies that they’re complaining killed the current social web by stifling open discussion and choking our feeds with ads and fees for use.