> People are posting all kinds of trash on Twitter equally, you don't expect to find the entire node is blocked because some users are posting things some others disagree with.

No, but I do expect the owner of the site to moderate its content. Pawoo doesn't care to; as a result, many people care not to federate with them. That's fine. You can still use Pawoo if you want to, or a server that federates with it, or set up your own and federate with them.

> Block the problem users, not the entire instance.

If it's a recurring problem that the owners of the instance won't do anything about, it's a lot less work to just block the entire instance.

> I looked for which node was ran with reliability and scaling built in, because I didn't want to be on a node that is ran by some hobbyist that is just going to give up one day, I also don't want to be on a server that falls over because scaling problems.

You're thinking like you're a customer, but on the Fediverse you're generally more like a houseguest.

> I tried running Mastodon myself, but quickly found it awful to keep updated

You've got a fair point there; I'm not sure why they can't distribute a container image with the assets pre-built instead of making you build your own. It's been trouble-free for me since I got it up and running, for what it's worth.

Lots of other things speak ActivityPub, though. If you're looking for something as simple as possible, you might like https://microblog.pub/

> I eventually switched to GNU Social with the Qwitter addon because it was easier to maintain and update, only for Mastodon to decide to drop support for the federating protocol it was using one day.

I haven't used it, but for what it's worth, the documentation for GNU Social seems to indicate that it supports ActivityPub these days. OStatus never made it past the draft stage, and GNU Social seems to be the last project hanging on to it.

> If we take your logic to its ultimate conclusion, you're saying that without investors or stock prices or the need to sell ads, the motivation behind making a good and sane experience evaporates, considering the state it's been in for years.

People mostly run instances for free, for fun, for their friends. The motivation is to have fun hanging out with friends on the internet. For this purpose, it seems to be pretty good at its job to me, and gets better at it with every version. The lack of financial incentive does mean there's no drive to capture more eyeballs, though, which means there's no drive to cater to folks that would rather have something exactly like Twitter.

> I honestly wouldn't try to disparage open source community projects like that to be honest.

I'm not sure what words you're trying to put in my mouth here, but that sentence certainly doesn't give me impression that you're trying to have a good-faith discussion.

> It has so many basic things fundamentally broken. On Twitter, if you delete a post, it's gone. On Mastodon, delete a post, well, it's deleted on your node. But the rest of the fediverse has replicated it and it's not deleted.

Yes, email works this way as well. It is an unavoidable consequence of federation. ActivityPub does have a "Delete" activity, but other servers are under no obligation to honor it. Regardless of what protocol is in use, once you've sent data to someone else's server, you're not going to be able to delete it without that server's cooperation.