Federated means you shoulder the cost of hosting the bits users care about, while they harvest all the value in what you post!

The Misskey forks are definitely the best UX as an end user I’ve tested out. And I found them easier to set up than Lemmy. But I also found that they caused frequent CPU spikes on my VPS.

I’m not sure if Mastodon does that or not, as I didn’t try running it, but I didn’t have the same experience with Akkoma or Friendica.

That said, I found Icefish’s implementation of the Mastodon API a godsend for mobile use.

Also that – thanks in large part to movements like the Arab Spring using Twitter to organize and publicize – it became the go-to social media for reporters. The news -> celebrity -> news cycle closes itself nicely there, making it very difficult for either group to go anywhere else.

It was ruined long before he touched it

It just made it worse faster

I have first@last.email, and my community rec organization couldn’t even accept it because their system had a hard coded lost of TLDs it would recognize for email addresses.

You can have as many forks as you want, but that’s a software engineer’s solution to a social problem. Lemmy is the “name brand” now for ActivityPub based federated content aggregation, and it will be orders of magnitudes more difficult to get support for forks, both from a contributor and from a user perspective.

Just look at last year’s Twitter migration, and the sea of people complaining about Mastodon not having features they felt were a requirement for adoption, while also ignoring every other Mastodon alternative on the Fediverse that had everything they were looking for.