You mean an open-twitter clone that caters to a very niche set of individuals? A complex system to work with.
I hate the whole gimmick of 150 character messages. That's not independent like the web was once.
Discord makes you pay to upload videos, sounds and those were all existing on MSN, Yahoo, A!M for free.
Everyone at my school knew of NewsGrounds, mySpace, BeBo, LiveJournal. Me and my friends had hosted ProBoards forums where we used to discuss stuff. You can't even do that according to the new Ofcom laws.
> "You mean an open-twitter clone that caters to a very niche set of individuals?"
It's not just one instance and not even one frontend existing for what can be described as "fediverse". Decentralization is the whole point.
> "a very niche set of individuals?"
Everything depends on the instance you're using. Some of them, like mastodon.social, are very active, others are not.
> "I hate the whole gimmick of 150 character messages"
Find a better instance. On the one I use it's 2k characters limit.
> "That's not independent web like it was."
Yes, because it's a whole new level of independence. NewGrounds, Myspace and everything you mentioned are centralized platforms, which is practically vendor lock-in, because you're dependent on just one vendor for everything you do on these platforms, while on fediverse, you aren't. Instances are completely (except for showing posts from one another) independent from each other - there's no central "authority" controlling all of them like there would be on a centralized platform. Thousands of them exist for every frontend imaginable, and you can create one yourself.
There is a reason why common people picked Bluesky instead of the fediverse.
Yes, and that is because "common" people became used to centralized platforms and don't bother. That's also why fediverse's main audience is techies.