You know I'm a committed user of the fediverse, perhaps this post will surprise you. Still, at some point the truth has to be told, before lying leads to a catastrophe. I think I've been present in the fediverse (sometimes hosting a pod of some software and sometimes not) since
I haven’t yet followed your links but there are some things that came to mind from the comment text.
Mostly just that one of the reasons I liked both friendica and Red (who share a common author), was precisely the agnosticism toward protocol. The platforms do what they can within the confines of each protocol, and simultaneously support as many as they can.
There was a dearth of development resources on friendica when the founder left but it didn’t take long for the community to pitch in and catch up.
At least, that’s the way I remember things.
Oh, absolutely. I love the “yes, we will implement every single protocol we figure out how to, if we find the resources and time” approach. In fact, I advocated that very approach a lot some years ago.
But that only gets us so far — we end up with a network where a lot of federated social networks federate with Friendica/Red, but not with one another. That’s less than ideal.
So I much prefer a situation where we finally get a single protocol a lot of software implements, so that interoperability can be had in any direction. And that’s what ActivityPub brought to the table, finally.