I’m thinking of the level of different content/functionality that facebook has, posts, audience control, private/group messaging, groups, marketplace, events.

If you spend your time looking beyond the 'mainstream' fedi platforms this problem has been solved by a family of softwares, hubzilla has them all, streams, forte, friendica have more or less most of what you listed.

I'm not sure if that's how internet platforms work as of today. It'd be a nice idea, for sure. And I think we have some all-in-one platforms. Or at least platforms who aspire to do a lot of different things. But other than that, I think it's kinda the same situation in the commercial internet. X does shorter public messages, Reddit does threaded discussions. YouTube does longer videos. Instagram does enless scrolling through short clips and images... And group chat rooms will be on Discord or WhatsApp. Classified ads and garage sales will be yet another platform... There's some blurry lines, for example YouTube can do image stories. But it's designed in a weird way and not really mainstream. They do short clips but you kinda switch modes when doing that and all younger people rarher stay on Instagram and TikTok anyway. People announce their events on Instagram all the time but it doesn't specifically help with the use-case. One thing they all have in common is some vaguely similar commenting system. It's social media after all. But I think they all focus on a specific subset of things. I know Elon Musk has some dream of providing an everything-app. But he can't do it either.

I wonder what average people even like. I kinda liked the early idea behind social media platforms like Facebook. You could send memes there, talk to friends or strangers, sell old stuff, talk about your pets in some group. or whatever. Maybe there's some space for one of our platforms which isn't occupied by a lot of competing platforms...

my eyes hurt at such heights of ai slop. the intention is good but lord that execution lacks taste

edit: talking about the site not your post

Even if there were some multi- or omni-functional fediverse metaplatform, I think "what do you want to do" is still a valid question. Some people may want to host a public forum, others may want to host a private family chat, others may want to host and/or share images and video, still others may want to all those things and more with an all-in-one solution. I don't think having a generalist platform would stop others from wanting to host niche or more specialized platforms for their own purposes; it all depends on what you want to do with your hardware.

With that said, I think it would be cool to have better interoperability between services. It'd be cool to have it so that if I make an account on a domain, I could hop easily between all the services hosted there. And it would be cool if it were easier for developers to make smaller services that can run on a general-purpose platform, and easier for admins to add and remove services as they wish, and maintain several services without it being an overwhelming hassle.

Yes, everything in the Fediverse can talk to each other. But not everything in the Fediverse gives its users the same features locally.

If you're looking for something like Facebook, then Mastodon is crap because

• it's too much of a tryhard Twitter clone
• you're limited to 500 characters
• conversations are too loosely tied together from toots and more toots (as opposed to one post, many comments like literally everywhere outside old-school microblogging)
• no contact suggestions
• no dedicated profile fields, combined with no comparing your profile to other users' profiles for ranking in the directory (would make it easy to find folks with the same interests and/or who live near you and/or who have contacts in common with you)
• most importantly, no support for groups whatsoever, not even for groups outside of Mastodon

Lemmy is just as much crap because it can only do groups, and you literally can't follow/connect to specific users.

(streams) and Forte have everything you want minus marketplace. Hubzilla has everything you want minus marketplace and then a whole lot on top.

However: All three have the Eiger North Face of learning curves. There aren't any dedicated phone apps for either. None of them work with Mastodon apps. You will have to use the Web interface, full stop (all three can be installed as PWAs, but next to nobody knows that PWAs exist, what they are and how to install them, and literally everyone wants a native mobile UI in the style of their phones). And there are next to no public, open-registration (streams) or Forte servers.

So there's no "load app on your phone, name, maybe e-mail, password, there you go, default settings work perfectly for 99.9% of all users".

And I say this as someone who has been using Hubzilla as a primary daily driver since both before Twitter was bought out and before Reddit was enshittified, and who also has two (streams) channels.

At the same time, not everyone is looking for a new Facebook. Many only want a Twitter replacement for dumb-dumbs; it's actually Misskey or Sharkey although everyone's only ever being pushed into Mastodon. Others only want "Reddit without enshittification, but otherwise literally Reddit" which is Lemmy. Others want "literally Instagram, but not owned by Mark Zuckerberg" which is Pixelfed.

None of them would be happy on that utter feature monster that's Hubzilla. Hubzilla as a Twitter replacement is like you want a little boat with an outboard engine, and you're offered the Queen Mary 2 (admittedly, with a rather well-written user manual and a helpful community).

well, put up or shut up? we are all doin our best for freakin free

i picked mbin because it was the most broadly connecting platform, but it has its limitations.. especially in the micro blogging arena.

youre welcome to contribute https://github.com/MbinOrg/mbin