The "fediverse"'s issue is that it wants to displace established social media and its problems without even trying to understand why it has the problems it has.

The "fediverse"'s issue is that it wants to displace established social media and its problems without even trying to understand why it has the problems it has. The thinking is that if you throw enough technical complexity at it then magically those problems will go away. Established social media is not flawed for the sake of it. No matter how much you hate them, nobody at Facebook is saying "let's make the world a miserable place just for the sake of it". They do for revenue and profit - all the noxiousness of traditional social media can be traced back to its advertising-based business models; including the lack of interoperability. No amount of "federation" or technobabble or artificial complexity is going to solve this fundamental problem - someone needs to get paid to keep the lights on, the servers humming, and the bad guys out. The current approach of the fediverse is to stick their head in the sand and pretend there is no problems. In reality of course there are problems - instances go down, the federation model means data is duplicated lots of times and makes hosting even costlier, and spam/bad actor prevention is non-existent (the only reason the whole thing isn't full of spam is because it's too irrelevant to actually bother spamming). If you actually think about addressing the root cause that makes existing social media noxious and opt for a different funding model (paid accounts, etc), then you'll realize none of that "federation" complexity is actually needed because suddenly you no longer have an incentive to do a lot of the obnoxious things that federation wants to solve. You can run a conventional centralized platform as a non-profit, and still let people attach their own domains, use alternative clients, etc. As a bonus, not having to duplicate the data many times means your costs will be lower than a "fediverse" equivalent and you can actually scale. And you could even pay a marketing intern for him to tell you that calling your consumer-facing product "Mastodon" is a recipe for failure (but hopefully if you've made it that far you'd already have the common sense to know this).