Your argument is based mostly based on an engineer perspective, perhaps you could benefit from looking at the product perspective a bit?
Take the ~2M people that are leaving Twitter this week and show them (a) Mastodon, (b) Pleroma with the default FE and (c) Soapbox/Rebased. How do you think the split would go?
Whatever issues are there on Soapbox, they could be fixed if the developers had the proper support, while you can give all the support in the world to Mastodon and we will never have QT.
Probably Mastodon. When people are outside of their wheelhouse (and technology wise most people are), they pick what everyone else is moving to. Mastodon is the media darling of the fediverse, for better and for worse.
The press has been hyping up Mastodon since 2016 on tech sites and even the general press only ever talks about Mastodon. Pleroma, Misskey and all the various offshoots are practical footnotes in terms of userbases (the only one with real usage is really Glitch-soc which is a Mastodon fork that exists to circumvent Gargrons BDFL tendencies). It sucks but that's how it is.
As for the issues on Soapbox; this argument also works for Pleroma. With proper support, Pleroma was, and arguably still is (although now moreso because everyone else is even sloppier), be the best software to use the fediverse with. It even supports different frontends, including Soapbox if you really wanted it.
I agree that Mastodon is a technical dead end for some features like QTs because Gargron is a BDFL who just doesn't want those features and imposes that on the project, but it's absurd to suggest that Soapbox is the best answer, when it's largely just a spite driven fork of Pleroma that is mostly picked for ideological reasons when admins aren't simply clueless about the projects history and offers basically no feature benefits. I encourage devs to put their time into Pleroma instead; more people benefit from that, especially considering Rebased just imports all changes from it's upstream anyway.
> I encourage devs to put their time into Pleroma instead; more people benefit from that, especially considering Rebased just imports all changes from it's upstream anyway.
For the end user, none of that matters much in comparison with the ability of just making a quote-tweet. You and Alex can continue having your fights; as an user and as someone running a commercial provider for AP software all I really want is to have software that can be used by people in a way that they want and that respects their freedoms. My feeling as an outsider is that the Mastodon devs are too stuck in their own ideology and the Pleroma devs are too focused on their own (techno-libertarian) audience. Alex seems to be the only one that, in his words, "just want to bring the normies to the Fediverse".
Take the ~2M people that are leaving Twitter this week and show them (a) Mastodon, (b) Pleroma with the default FE and (c) Soapbox/Rebased. How do you think the split would go?
Whatever issues are there on Soapbox, they could be fixed if the developers had the proper support, while you can give all the support in the world to Mastodon and we will never have QT.