Something tells me this isn’t the last word on the issue. If the fediverse concept is to succeed, then its two (current) largest players need to have some cross-functionality.

I strongly disagree here. They might be using the same protocol, but the user expectations are something completely different. I've tried mastodon and really don't get the appeal, just like I never understood why people want something like Twitter. And I'm sure there are some Mastodon users out there who can't be bothered about Lemmy.

Forcing them into one common framework feels like alienating both to me.

It honestly takes some of the fun out of it, I really thought there would be more cross-communication.

Its anathema to the whole concept of the fediverse that one person - a lemmy dev - gets to decide something so important.

I should have clarified that it's 2 devs, Nutomic & Dessalines.

I am unsure if their political views have any affect on being the ones wanting to decide on important things like that. I know that they are both openly communist, and they both have Fidel Castro as their profile picture.

Perhaps the fediverse will get big enough that third-party developers will step in to fix this.

Unless they can convince the devs to integrate, I believe the third-party developers would have to fork the project and convince Lemmy instances to switch to their fork. From there, the third-party developers might change the name from Lemmy to something else.

I keep coming back to imagining if Reddit and Twitter were integrated. It just sounds like a giant mess. I guess I'm just not sure what the benefit would be, or why anyone would want it. What's the actual use case that makes it desirable?