Even techies have issues deploying, maintaining and upgrading kbin and lemmy instances and even for those that work, the admins say they are held together by wishes, prayers and digital duct tape. From just the casual user's perspective, the software is buggy, not intuitive, a lot of data gets lost in transit between instances and there's a lot of downtime due to influx of new users (which is still a miniscule amount compared to what other social networks usually handle).

I don't think he's that far off when it comes to readiness. I want this to succeed but it's not ready yet for the mainstream, maybe in another 6-12 months.

Yea, really do think Nilay's the one that keeps The Verge ticking. As long as he's the head editor, the site will do well.

The idea that we need an all-encompassing social media platform.