Technology

yeah, but fedi has lots of baked in issues, especially a virulent userbase that is glad to use bots and other tools to turn fedi not into a liberal space but an illiberal space full of extremist and exclusionary politics. they are bringing over their social media echo chamber stuff and just try to re-create it here rather than on commercial platforms where they were kicked out of or left due to censoring of their extremism.

the issue is a large section of the userbase here isn't like 2000s tech libertarians, that founded most of the internet and the 'net culture we are nostalgic for... a lot of that mentality is essentially extinct or viewed as toxic now. recall that reddit never had a block feature until 2016... 11 years after it started and only when Donald Trump was already in office.

hell most of the devs who are building the fedi are different flavors of political extremists themselves... and there are already many scandals/debates over how many fedi projects have baked in controls or default settings to censor and block things.

more than the internet, the world itself and it's viewpoints are fundamentally different from where they were 20-30 years ago. we had much more of a monoculture and a narrower overton window back then. the type of stuff that goes on cable news programs these days would have been un-airable 20 years ago.

even in using reddit from 2010-2015, there was a massive tonal shift as the site grew, and it became massively more miserable as the politics flooded the site and every other subreddit became people fighting over R vs D.