Can't mastodon, bluesky, twitter, threads, etc. not just be federated together? It seems like a relatively straightforward problem to solve. Especially consider

Can't mastodon, bluesky, twitter, threads, etc. not just be federated together? It seems like a relatively straightforward problem to solve. Especially considering several of these are kind of designed for federating. I'm actually on most of these networks. I'm not on Threads yet. Just not especially in a hurry to join that crowd. But with four networks largely not sharing any content between them for mostly petty (non technical) reasons, it's a definite downgrade from when everyone was using Twitter. It seems a lot of energy is being wasted on raising walls against federating or arguing why such a thing would be a bad thing. I agree with Tim Bray that the tech largely doesn't matter. What matters is the users and the content. And that is fragmented all over the place right now. Twitter messed up by becoming a toxic waste dump and then losing a lot of its user base. What remains just isn't very interesting to me. BTW. Twitter had changed for the worse long before Elon Musk got involved. I see that more as a symptom than the root cause. The real problem was infighting inside Twitter and many years of stagnation of the platform because of a complete and utter lack of leadership. And good old corporate greed and VC induced stupidity/madness. They gradually rolled back features that made the platform interesting. They shut down the fire hose, they killed third party clients, and then AI was imposed. And then you got all the clowns gaming the AI trying to "win" at everybody else's expense. they threw out the baby with the bathwater. Enshittication is a great word for that. Everything that made Twitter great was killed/removed. And then they got Elon Musk. Not the other way around. The shock therapy applied by Elon Musk was pretty brutal and ugly but also highlights what a bloated, dysfunctional platform it had become. There wasn't much left by the time he took over. Just a bunch of clowns pretending to be a mature company and clearly failing hard at that. I don't think Musk will save it but it's interesting that you can just remove layers of dysfunctional crap from an org chart with a flame thrower (in human form) and not have the whole thing collapse into a pile of rubble. The platform continues to function with a fraction of the people involved. If somebody adds federation to the platform, unexpected good things might actually happen. This isn't rocket science from a technical point of view. Mastodon runs on a shoestring budget. Flicking short text messages around at scale is kind of a solved problem technically.