It seems to me that lots of opinions about how to improve the fediverse miss the basic fact of federation. ActivityPub is a protocol (standard?) that allows information to flow freely between vastly different applications and servers. That allows for distributed social media among other things. There is no particular reason why you have to take advantage of that feature. Truth.social, for example, does not.
I think that this becomes obscured because there are a variety of different reasons for wanting your social media use to be based on ActivityPub. Truth.social was, presumably, that it works and is easy and cheap enough to deploy. That is probably quite attractive for less awful people. If I want a social media experience dedicated entirely to discussion of cats, I can probably make it happen at a reasonable cost by using ActivityPub. You might want to use it because it allows interoperability between different applications, so you don't have to have Instagram, Facebook, twitter, substack, etc. You might want it because it is non-commercial. You might want it because it gives you power over moderation.
These are all good reasons, but they do not result in the same outcomes for how the fediverse is run. They couldn't. In fact, there cannot be a how the fediverse is run anymore than a how the internet is run. What that means is that there will not be a fediverse. There will be kolektiva.social, truth.social, mastodon.social, cats.social and so on. The level of interaction that happens between them will be determined by the vision of people running the server.
It doesn't surprise me that some of the smaller instances that exist to provide a heavily moderated social media experience block mastodon.social which wishes to be part of a large, interoperable social media ecosystem or kolektiva.social which wishes to be part of a large, DIY non-commercial (left wing) social media ecosystem. When mastodon.social allows ads, I suspect Kolektiva will block it because the tension between the visions will become apparent. What does surprise me is that some people both want to take advantage of a distributed social media ecosystem whilst expecting uniformity of use.
