I'm assuming because American arms dealers like Lockheed Martin are losing a ton of business and America is rapidly losing the soft power and influence its build over the past 80 years

DHH offered to upstream some of the funding to arch but they declined

I tried Mastodon two times in the past. I love the idea of federation and really want it to work. There's just too much friction though.

First you have to choose an instance. If there isn't a sensible default preselected when you download an app you already lost almost all non-technical people.

But I'm a technical, motivated individual, so I managed. Next I wanted to follow some creators I know. I couldn't just look them up, I had to find them on twitter or other places and manually copy their name@instance or whatever into mastodon.

Cool. Now I can press follow and it'll follow, right? Wrong. I press follow and nothing happens. I find out It's pending? I'm guessing both instances have to accept federation between them?

Let's follow some more creators I know. What do you mean I can't follow someone because their instance is straight up blocked by my instance because their instance mods think everything anime-related is for pedos? So I can't follow creators from both instances because they don't like each other? So I need to find an instance which isn't blocked by anyone, doesn't block anyone? Or host my own one person instance and hope other instances accept my federation?

At this point you already lost 99.9% of people. I want mastodon to work, but it straight up sucks.

You can hate DHH, but that's a straight up lie. They have repos, custom packages. They have an ISO installer, mirrors, even a custom kernel. If that's not a distro then what is?

I got the steam machine reservation queue mail 2 days ago, so something may be happening there too