I’m a hobby web programmer and I’m completely blown away by how smoothly this site runs, how well it scaled, how full-featured it is despite its youth, and how unbelievably dedicated the developer (ernest) is. I cannot possibly have a single complaint.
In fact I’ve often thought about giving back by helping with the development. I’m just a little guy but maybe some little contributions help too. Unfortunately I’m just not very experienced with PHP.
What you said about Mastodon would surely differ from instance to instance, unless you’re referring to the global feed where everything is federated.
What I personally like most about Mastodon, Lemmy and Kbin is that they don’t use an algorithm to decide on my behalf what I should or shouldn’t see. If I subscribe to another user, I will see their posts, and I will see them in the correct chronological order. Not this hidden secret “personalization” algorithm that randomly decides to hide something from me because it wouldn’t draw engagement, and decides to show me something I didn’t ask for because it would.
He’s a CEO precisely because he does things like this. CEOs are selected for maximum profitability at the detriment of literally everything else. That’s also why psychopathy is way more widespread among CEOs than the general population.