In many ways this ... is also basically caused by being increasingly disappointed with how things are going in the #Fediverse but maybe that's just a bubble thing. I've been out here ever since early identi.ca days, with my first post on federated social networks dating back to 2011 and still being around somewhere in the Wayback Machine. As of 2018, I think, this was the first time ever to feel like this kind of networks could finally be up to counter the commercial walled gardens, to provide an actual, human, human-centered alternative to surveillance capitalism and people farming. Turns out: It surely does better than Facebook, X, ... in some way. But it still is far from where it would need to be for that. And worse, it doesn't seem to improve much. Sure, individual platforms have matured. Mastodon has. Friendica has. But at the very end, at the bottom of things, in 2026 (eight years later) it's still the same un-addressed, unresolved issues to run into as in 2018 (which I have been whining about often enough not to do it again). Still, from some angles, it's amazing to see how some of these things did "just work" before on Diaspora* (and still do). It's amazing to see some of these issues fixed in ATProto (regardless of ones opinion on Bluesky) because people cared to think a bit ahead of the status quo in advance. It's, too, saddening to see how many once-vivid accounts and contacts out here have either turned quiet or deleted their accounts or visibly announced retreat into some walled garden (again) or to individual blogging and all of that. It's not a bad thing. It's an individual decision that should of course be respected. But it's sad. It feels very much like mission not accomplished. It feels like specifically ActivityPub has turned out to be what it apparently started wanting to be - a protocol that focuses on open networking but actually, in this, focuses on hackers and tinkerers and developers rather than users and communities, a protocol that by design is biased towards people building "something new" on top of it (and making compatibility - or lack thereof - something anyone else is to blame for) over people using technology in a reliable manner. Not sure whether the Fediverse is growing or shrinking and at some point I don't really bother that much at the moment. Just hoping that, for the time being, #Friendica will somehow continue working as good as it can to keep different channels under one hood (and not having to decide to keep or cut contacts based on an individual network technology choice again - or being overwhelmed by trying to handle a plethora of different inboxes in a load of almost fully equal yet separated systems) - and hoping for people out here to be forgiving if there are things, conversations, communications I just miss out on. Maybe part of the deal is accepting that big-picture things over "here" aren't built with reliability in mind.