[dickhardt]

The OP conflates the fediverse with Mastodon, and my understanding of his key point is that it is doomed because Mastodon is complicated to run. As the operator of https://press.coop, I agree. Mastodon is 10 yr old web tech (Ruby on Rails with Postgres) that does not take advantage of modern cloud architectures. (The streaming service is written in nodejs and is efficient and just works)

But software continues to evolve. There are numerous other software projects on the fediverse, Cloudflare's Wildebeest being an example of a more efficient, and easier to manage implementation. Crowdfunding has become a common means for instances to be funded. It is still early days for the fediverse, and the pace of innovation continues to accelerate. Remember that Twitter was twttr when it launched, and was an SMS based app. Flickr was a Flash app.