I am a backend engineer and would love to work on a project like this. What's muddying the waters right now is the "decentralization" federation kick (Mastodon,

I am a backend engineer and would love to work on a project like this. What's muddying the waters right now is the "decentralization" federation kick (Mastodon, Lemmy etc.), which kills the user experience and ability to grow into a viable social network. Too many resources are getting wasted on this idea. And the people working on it just don't get it. Users don't care about who is hosting the servers and most people aren't in constant drama with unpaid moderators and the censorship boogeyman. A direct centralized reddit clone without the god awful UI, dark patterns, and increasing poor leadership decisions would probably be an immediate success. Apollo for mobile plus old.reddit on the desktop would hit a million users in weeks.