Oh man ... that article (actually an interview by the same Sean Tilley in this thread and the founding developer of a bunch of fediverse stuff ... Mike Macgirvin) ... has Mike firing shots at the fediverse all over the place!! It's glorious! I had no idea this interview existed (it's from 2017).

But, from what I have been able to glean, a lot Mike's criticisms track pretty well ... especially this excerpt which, IMO, gets at the heart of what's wrong with the fediverse and what will probably be its undoing:

What’s the most frustrating thing about developing software in this space?

People on different projects tend to refuse to listen to anybody outside their chosen project, or treat them as an enemy, without looking at what the others bring to the table and what core strengths other projects provide and figuring out how to work with them.

As a result, every project re-implements their own incompatible solutions to every federation problem and ridicules any other solutions that others have provided without so much as logging into the service and having a look at how it works. They believe their own project is “special” and someday the masses of the internet will leave the walled gardens and come crawling to their awesome project, begging to use their awesome services.

Just look at how lemmy and mastodon think of each other, as platforms, and how well they work together, despite having so much more in common with each other than just about everything else out there, not to mentioned being bound to a shared fate more than they want to admit.