With Linux, I can change just about everything. If I want a real-time kernel, I can switch. If I want a different desktop environment, change. If I want more control from my keyboard, Linux has my back.

As much as I agree with the sentiment of the article, this is a terrible reason and more likely to scare people away from Linux rather than get them to install it.

If you know what a “real-time kernel” is, you’re probably already using Linux and you are a highly technically literate user. Any “normal person” user is going to look at that and think “Oh, I guess I need to understand technobabble in order to use Linux”. Normal users care about easy, preset defaults, not customization.

Once again, Linux adoption is kneecapped by its own users, who forget what normal people really care about.

As much as “instance drama” can be a bit tiring, I think it might be an inevitable outcome and shouldn’t necessarily be seen as completely bad. My thinking is that instance drama would not occur if all the instances were similar, and that would be bad. As it is, there are actually differences among the instances and that’s good - some disagreements due to those differences is inevitable.

Now, it would be good if we could agree to disagree and still be friends… but that also moves into the paradox of tolerance. But I would say most instances have nothing strongly against each other, despite any differences in moderation or rules or approach. The Pareto principle applies too… probably 20% of the instances are responsible for 80% of the drama. If you don’t like the drama, try avoiding those 20% of instances 😅.

if you transfer resources to them

I get what you’re saying here and mostly agree, but just want to point out that you are transferring a resource - your labour. So it is a bit more nuanced than this.

I doubt they knowingly sponsored a project based on the developers’ political ideologies

But now they should know right? But the response makes it clear they don’t really care. They want to include everyone in the “big tent”, which clearly runs afoul of the paradox of tolerance. I am not a fan of their response.

It sounds like that would require unifying the architecture of all fediverse platforms, which nobody is interested in and very much goes against the point (decentralization). Right now all of these platforms are written independently, with unique architectures and different programming languages.

Suffice to say that, while it’s a nice thought, what you’re proposing is not really realistic, nor is it actually desired.

Matrix is not part of the fediverse, so that’s kind of a special case and doesn’t work the same at all as the rest.

What you describe sounds very simplified, but let me assure you that there is nothing simple about this problem (I say that as a software engineer that has studied ActivityPub, the protocol underlying the fediverse).

It feels like they could all be part of one unified platform.

They are. It’s called the fediverse.

There’s no reason why any of these software options couldn’t support all the same stuff, as you say. But so far they have chosen not to.

Maybe another option will come along one day that supports more of it at once.

I’d love to use this but I just mostly don’t use multiple devices at the same time, so I don’t see how the sync would ever happen.