I interpret that as a complaint about the UX, but I have almost the opposite take. The UX has its quirks, certainly, but - as a professional in distributed syst

I interpret that as a complaint about the UX, but I have almost the opposite take. The UX has its quirks, certainly, but - as a professional in distributed systems and a veteran of online forums going back to Usenet and even a bit before - I'm actually more concerned about the distributed-system parts. The inconsistency in what you'll see if you try to view a thread, depending on which instance you're looking from, is reflected in the UX but is fundamentally a problem with how Mastodon in particular connects to other instances and processes queues. The O(n^2) communication pattern that the fediverse generally seems to fall into - relays exist but seem very little used and not organized among themselves - is what I think will limit growth well before Twitter or Reddit scale. I don't think the problem is that the people who designed ActivityPub and the fediverse were experts in one area and novices in another. They were (trying to be kind here) still learning across all of the relevant areas. Some of them might be approaching expert level now, and other experts might have joined since the early days, but that only means the work to fix the protocols and implementations of those protocols can begin.