There's no such thing as perfect software.

This was a huge learning in my journey. Realising that every technical decision is a matter of tradeoffs - that there is no perfect pattern/framework/library/implementation/architecture/whatever.

Once the obviously bad choices have been eliminated.

Thank you for these insights!

Yeah, aside from developer muscle, an effort like this requires deep knowledge of the existing system. Or, failing that, a commitment to learning it.

It's also not something that can be done as a side project, if it hopes to compete with the main project to the point of replacing it. Something like that requires an ungodly amount of effort and dedication. Someone would have to commit years of their life to solely working on that.

This is my thought as well. The whole point of this system is that if you feel like you have better choices and ability, you are well within your rights to spin up your own instance and manage it, and make your own choices. Just follow the standards, and you should be able to integrate with existing platforms. They are free to defederate, but that's their call to do so. It's always been a tradeoff, and one of the big things with Reddit is that, even to a point now, it's Reddit or nothing. With federated sites, leaving a platform isn't starting completely over like it is leaving Reddit.

Misskey is a little bit odd, in the sense that there's constantly new forks in various stages of development. New forks emerge just as quickly as old ones die off.

It may be that the frontend and backend both being written in one language helps make the system easier to hack on. I can't say for sure. What's weird is that some of these forks go in really odd directions, like rewriting the whole backend in a different programming language.

The other thing is that, despite their proliferation, the effort is somewhat fragmented into all of these little projects. I'm not sure how viable any of these forks are in the long term.