My guess would be that

a) building their next social network on an open platform will let antitrust regulators off their back

and/or b) a Twitter clone sounds less sexy then a web3 / decentralized fediverse play. Meta has chased every other bandwagon (metaverse, ai, etc), it's entirely possible this is just them always chasing the hot new thing so that they don't miss out. They certainly aren't going to let themselves be Blackberry and refuse to change, they'd rather desperately copy every hot new thing and change quickly to always have an offering that appeals to their customers good enough

No, this feels like a massive corporation with massive marketing and market research departments succinctly breaking down a concept that most on the fediverse nerd out too much to do.

I shouldn't have doubted Apple's campaign for minimalism > functionality

In Apple's case it's a subtle encouragement to buy their watch.

I'm pretty sure it's just to cut costs / complexity / part counts in lower end phones, and higher end phones will use an always on display.

Though worth noting that the Nothing Phone 1 & 2 include pretty snazzy LEDs on the back that are used for notifications amongst other things.

Now, there are single sign-on (SSO) possibilities, but for them to be universally accessible across the Fediverse, you either need to impose them on 20,000 admins across two dozen software implementations, or you need them all to a) agree to support SSO, and b) agree to support the same SSO options.

Yeah, this is the real crux of the issue and is a large unsolved problem. We simply have no standardized system for decentralized identity verification.

SSO works as a way of maintaining identity across the fediverse, but that's not really federating identity so much as it's getting all instance to offload identity verification to various central services.

I believe I heard Microsoft had a research project in the area of decentralized identity verification but I don't know if it went anywhere or how suitable it would be.

I think what they mean is identity that is coupled to them the person and not whichever instance they choose to sign in on.

The fediverse not dying has yet to be proven.

Everyone on here keeps acting like they're in a position of power and the fediverse is destined for success, but here's the thing, it still sucks compared to the content that's on Reddit and FB/IG, because there's still a tiny fraction the number of users. The fediverse is only going to be the great place to have a conversation about stuff if people use it, and everyone rushing to cut off a massive source of funding / users / content while the fediverse is still trying to compete against Reddit et al seems like a huge mistake.

I'm sorry, but no. The point of the fediverse is not to spin up niche communities, since we already have forums. You want to be part of a niche small forum, go spin up your own bb instance and run a niche small forum.

The point of the fediverse is to recreate the global social networks that are twitter / Reddit / etc, but to do so using open source servers that are decentralized and anyone can host.

Again, federation is not a user facing feature, it's an architecture / implementation detail. Fediverse enthusiasts are like train enthusiasts who love every detail of how they're built and their history and how much philosophically better they are than cars, but none of that matters and train networks will fail if they don't provide quick and convenient transportation to their users.

Software exist to solve a user's problem. All software's primary motivator should be user experience.

It's quite frankly asinine to spend your time building a social network that user's don't want to use (see: Reddit's official app / new site).

Ignoring psychology, network effects, and how social networks work while instead trying to build one based on naiive dogma is doomed to failure.

As for the confusion / chaos around multiple/redundant/competing communities and so on...that will get better over time as people figure things out. Honestly it's not that different than reddit with all of its splinter subs like "true-" whatever.

That's true for just the duplication problem, but the defederation / shadow banning issue is not one that reddit has and is pretty confusing and poor user experience for new users coming in.

If you have to write a long ass post telling users that they're using your software wrong, then you wrote bad software.

Don't want people to think it's supposed to be Twitter? Don't model the entire UX after Twitter.