Fediverse

First ... I totally agree.

Second, firefish and calckey are the same thing (calckey rebranded to firefish).

Third ... it's not just about software. I think that's superficial reasoning. There's a lot of patience, organisation and earned trust required before there's an instance with admins choosing to run a particular platform with a good number of users on there. The success of mastodon ought not, IMO, be (entirely) attributed to dumb luck.

There's been a lot of persistent and committed work from gargron and mastodon, and the truth that many "platform diversity" types (including myself) run into is it's not the user's fault ... who's going to maintain, run, promote and support a platform and its early instances with commitments to decent performance, scalability and maintenance into the future? Calckey/firefish, for example, have actually kinda struggled recently, despite really trying and having an attractive platform, because they haven't been able to provide a stable and performant instance with even minor growth in users, nor a UI that works well on mobile. It's an uphill battle, and I don't think you can blame users for wanting some degree of trustworthiness from a platform before they jump in, however much of a chicken-egg problem it is.