And what would be those “trade secrets”? The ability to make posts and have them being read by other people? I’m pretty sure every forum software since the '70s has prior art. Elons fragile narcissism know no bounds.

As much as I try to sympathise with the author, he seems to suffer from a terminal case of Twitter-brain, where we all comment on the current-thing until we beat it into the ground and then find another current-thing to dissect to death. Some of us like to separate interest and usernames, without setting up a data mineable online profile. And what’s with Disord being touted as an alternative? It is ok for coordinating and communicating with your gaming buddies, but completely unusable for any forum acivity.

On what metric did Mastodon fail? It has a vibrant community and lively conversations. I have seen what counts as “succsses” by corporate standards - a site that is ad infested to the point of unusability, and where users are kept in a state od agitation by the algorhythm for maximum retention and exploitation. I hope that Mastodon, and Kbin/Lemmy never become a “succsses” by corpo silo standards.