I'm afraid there's not much chance of me continuing this project.
At the time I was humoring/researching it, I was also making an effort to center the Fediverse in my personal social media usage. I really wanted to believe in it. But ultimately I just couldn't abide the culture that I found there.
A particular turn-off was that a lot of people seemed to feel comfortable displaying open hostility toward the lead developer of the Mastodon project. There was a vague sense that some collection of users and instance admins saw the project as inadequately responsive to their needs and interests; and (from my perspective) a definite sense that a lot of people felt enabled to be toxic about it because other people around them were being toxic about it. I couldn't even figure out what specific decision(s) Mastodon had made to upset these people in this way; everyone I asked seemed to just take it for granted that there was something and it was willfully bad.
You can imagine how excited I was at the prospect of devoting a lot of time and energy to a project that would have a largely overlapping user base, for no compensation. /s
Maybe I was unlucky and happened to land in a disproportionately toxic corner of the Fediverse -- but I looked around, and I'm not really of that opinion. There is an argument to be made, given the timing, that I was seeing the disgruntlement and culture shock of a lot of displaced Tumblr users. Even still, I'm not interested in going back or trying again.
I should say that my drama isn't the only factor. I couldn't find any other developers interested in helping, and my attempts at administrating a Flarum instance for my own friends never really took off. But I would probably have kept trying if not for the discouragement of my experiences in the Fediverse.
If someone else were willing to take the lead, I would happily donate all the code I've written and possibly make some contributions. But it's just not relevant enough to my present interests to spearhead the whole thing myself.
