“Doesn’t scale because the containers are set up wrong” is different from “unmaintainable code” though. What of the code was bad? I’ve looked at a bunch of fedi projects and Pixelfed didn’t strike me as either particularly good or particularly bad.

As for the last, I don’t have any examples

?

I mean, that is sort of what I expected. Mastodon doesn’t publicize Wordpress. Lemmy doesn’t publicize mbin. They all, mostly, mention a little bit of the context that they can interoperate with other federated services, but it doesn’t strike me as weird or malicious that someone would write a project and then promote that project. That sounds normal.

Actually, both Mastodon and Lemmy chose to implement sort of their own versions of ActivityPub, and that actually does strike me as selfish behavior. It means that mostly they are their own independent platforms that run “on top of” ActivityPub instead of enabling full interoperation with the other stuff. Doing it that way was hard to avoid, because the design of ActivityPub to me isn’t great, but this situation is actually a perfect example of that: Mastodon implemented a new feature in a way that would break (in a really jarring privacy-violating-to-some-extent way) until everyone else copied their implementation exactly. I’m not aware of Pixelfed doing anything like that. Mastodon and Lemmy can both get away with presenting themselves as “the fediverse” and forcing everyone else into copying one implementation or the other if they want things to actually work, and they both show very little interest in making it easy. If you want to pick out sins of various fedi projects to start to point out that are disrespecting the other projects in the space, something like that is where I would start.