Auster

Regarding DMs, my experience on other social medias is that people seem to take DMs as “their own home” - even if the door is either ajar or fully open, it’s impolite or even offending to enter without being invited first.
Regarding interacting with communities, some may see an unidentified profile as someone’s alt or, as mentioned by you, a bot, and other than making well founded points, I don’t see much that could be done to mitigate mistrust towards blank profiles.
And regarding Reddit specifically, I don’t know if it’s a flawed design, a flawed and long-going moderation, the platform being parasited by problematic users and external groups, or a mix of the 3, but even marginally big communities and even before Spez’s stunts, most communities I’ve seen there are a test on patience and composure.

If I understood the joke (not familiar with the acronyms), it’s about gas-based equipment breaking down more easily?

Maybe in some cases, it helps to use Alt F10, or, since I’m using Mint and it may change in other systems, maybe the equivalent for yours?

And if the user uses Mbin instances, he/she can even block posts that link to other domains, as often political posts link to news sites.

And some times, having the initiative to create such more specific communities could be a change factor for the growth of a social media. Also, with federation, not just the person can choose where to create the community on while not making it a walled garden as other sites would still have access to it, but also if a community for the given subject already exists but the user thinks he can do better, he/she can more easily do it with how expansive the “fediverse” is.

Growth is a process, not an immediate switch. Every social media started small and then grew. If immediatism, or however it is called, was the predominant factor for any struggle to become an achievement, nothing would be achieved.

And on lack of contents, I, for one, block everything that is not of my interest, quite a lot to be honest, specially with certain niches spamming the federated platforms, but even then, I get a feeling I should trim even some of the communities/magazines I follow/subscribe to as I can barely catch up to those already.

Got RISC OS

mom, I’m scared

Didn’t get it. "<.<

While I think fragmentation can grow into being a problem, trying to standardize things too much can be problematic too, as the developers would be bloating the software for features that the community may use very little, as well as, by consequence of the bloating, the devs being either limited to a design that needs to take into account the quirks of all object formats, or to make some frankenstein monster design to include those different formats.

A more reliable path, I think, is what Kbin (RIP) and its successor Mbin do, to have a section for articles and one for notes. While it’s still more load on the developers and the servers, at least it shouldn’t be as much as having to make sense of multiple formats together, since the two sections don’t directly interfere with each other. This, on a final point, is, to my understanding, and with their respective proportions, what happens with the Linux family of operating systems, where it’s also pretty fragmented, but every once in a while a way to put two different environments together appear, like Wine and Xfce translating Windows and QT5 programs, or AppImage and Flatpak trying to be as universal as possible by depending on as little default dependencies from the host system as possible.

Something I’ve been thinking about is that changes only happen organically, so I think it’s good to not be an insistent advocate for a platform X, Y or Z. Instead, I think that perhaps it’s better, instead, to simply use the platform the person is more favorable towards whenever possible, and if people then share something worth sharing, it should slowly bring people over. And regarding the annoying part, at most, making a note about technicalities and the type of people in the site could be good if discussions the person is engaged in allows, and if the person didn’t burn people’s patience by being pedantic.

From the little I have seen, there seemed to be quite a few on Misskey instances, though I don’t know how representative it is if compared to, e.g., X/Twitter, where most of the artists I would find were at.