I'm not sure the author of this article lives in the same universe as me:

"...A vast number of people find Mastodon, Pleroma, WriteFreely, Pixelfed, and the many other wonderful fediverse tools useful, yet we hear about these platforms almost entirely by word-of-mouth, not from the technology sections of major news sites, or even dedicated tech blogs..."

Perhaps partially true about the others mentioned but Mastodon and PixelFed in particular seem to have been rarely out of the tech press, for the past year or so. So much so that I have, in the past, asked how come they get so much uncritical press coverage and concluded that they each have very active PR departments.

Funnily enough, I've had a similarly titled draft of an article sitting on my hard drive for months now, but never got around to knocking it into shape. My TLDR; conclusion is that the Fediverse is 'doomed to fail' because it's based on a fallacy of un-censorability and freedom from control by faceless corporations; "If you don't like the way it's [a fediverse server] run, you can take your data elsewhere" being the oft-quoted mantra.

It's a fallacy because you simply can't 'take your data elsewhere'. Exporting your data from Mastodon will export your settings and followers list --the two easiest things to replicate elsewhere. Your actual posts are not able to be exported. So, if you move servers, you essentially lose everything you've invested in Mastodon, just like you would if you moved from Twitter to Mastodon or A.N.Other social network, in the first place.

I'm not sure if a similar situation exists with PixelFed. I never even got so far as trying that one, when I signed up and then found out there was no way to import my existing photos from Instagram. Which raises the other reason why these new kids on the block are doomed to fail: None of them provide a way for you to import your existing data from the 'big boy' social networks they're seeking to replace and hoping people you will switch from.

Here's an issue about this on PixelFed's Github from Jan 2019, which makes this particular point in more detail [0]. as you can see, Pixelfed's response was a vague "It's on the roadmap" and, a year later, to close the issue. As far as I'm aware, there is still no way to import your existing Instagram photos to PixelFed.

The above is also true of Mastodon; no Twitter import there.

In addition to those two glaring problems, the Fediverse is also touted as the answer to corporate censorship and hailed as a defender of free speech. Yet the same freedom loving Fediverse quickly closed ranks in attempt to freeze out Gab.com, when Gab adopted Mastodon; firstly by refusing to list Gab's servers in their Mastodon instance directories --in spite of Gab.com having the largest number of users-- and, secondly, by releasing updates to several Android and iOS Mastodon client apps, so that they would no longer connect to Gab's servers, even if the app user manually entered the server info. So much for 'individual freedom of choice, not dictated by corporations'!

That spat caused Gab to fork Mastodon and create their own version, Gab-Social which, actually seems now to be more advanced and feature rich than the official Mastodon software it split off from. So because of "politics", regular Mastodon users lose out on advances made by Gab's coders and the Fediverse is further diluted by having two different and incompatible versions of their 'Twitter-Killer'. Yay! As if there weren't enough obstacles to mass adoption already, let's add 'fragmentation' into the mix!

'Fediverse Doomed to Failure' is spot on!

[0]https://github.com/pixelfed/pixelfed/issues/765

[1]https://code.gab.com/gab/social/gab-social/