I will no longer be able to assist with development nor debugging actual issues with the software... Quite juvenile behavior from the devs. It stemmed from this issue where the devs continuously argued in public by opening and closing an issue. Anyway, thought I would keep y'all apprised of the situation, since these are the people maintaining the software you are currently using.
Mastodon - not a link aggregator, tree-threaded, kbin hmm PHP (yuk) and mostly one contributor and by far not as feature rich as lemmy. The rest similarly as Mastodon is not close to reddit as lemmy is.
And yes ActivityPub grows with multiple projects, but I mean specifically something like lemmy or kbin and something that can be a reddit replacement of sorts. There's a little bit more happening than just ActivityPub behind the scenes btw. And it's still no small feat to have a platform like Mastodon or lemmy (I think those two are the mostly the forerunners by now). Sure it's not super complex, but the amount of features are often underestimated by a lot of people (as far as I can read here and often somewhere else, so why is there no real alternative to lemmy yet...?)
Yeah, I mean, that's fair. I do obviously prefer the discussion format or I'd be off fiddling around with Firefish. But also, like, on another level, the redditesque format seems to bring this inherent negativity, toxicity and one-upping garbage. Though that has gotten a lot worse since the reddit exodus, I think part of that is just people getting back into that familiar comfort zone.
It would be nice to see something that isn't quite as user-focused as Mastodon or Firefish but isn't quite designed to be a Reddit clone in a way that might bring something new to the table.
Sure I'm totally in for something new, maybe even more in a wiki based style (i.e. collecting knowledge) or a mix of all kinds of things (like StackExchange etc.). But I don't think that the concerns you have, have much to do with the platform and more with the users using the platform. The communities I'm mostly on, are civil and objective/less emotionally driven. This topic is (as the title already implies) a little bit the exception...