I appreciate the author taking a swing at this topic.

Agreed, me too. Also, thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts regarding this - they're very insightful.

It's hard to pick out values that we all share because of the inherently chaotic nature of it. Perhaps that's a value tho - diversity.

I agree. I don't think it's realistic to expect all of the fediverse to adopt a set of core values, not any more than we can expect all of the internet to adopt a core set of values. Certainly, there's no one in a position to enforce them from the down top, at the very least.

most apps have between ghastly to ok accessibility.

I want to start off by saying that I respect you and your opinion very much. I think this is a serious point of concern, especially considering that a major reason given for the exodus that happened from a major website back in July 2023 occurred in part due to fear of loss of accessibility (which was an unintended consequence of API restrictions). r/blind moved to the fediverse primarily because of this point.

So basically, a failure here really feels like it would have serious ramifications for the fediverse.

There's certainly groups on Mastodon who are keen on privacy, consent and accessibility but if you look at the features of the apps and how they're constructed I don't feel like those are really core values.

Agreed - but that just means there's room for something new. Hopefully from the diversity of groups that you alluded to above, a privacy minded group with dev skills will arise with a new entrant to the fediverse here.

ActivityPub is a privacy nightmare

I've been doing some thinking about this. One (not yet fully fleshed out) thought I had was if content was retained on the original server (the one the community/magazine is based in) and others receive a new "CONTENT_LINK" type of ActivityPub message that points back to the original server. A good app/web UI can then fetch from the link to display the content - but this would happen client side and be meant to be analogous to a web browser fetching a page from a web server. I wrote more about what I had in mind in https://lemmy.world/comment/12109601

No billionaire can buy the fediverse and shape it in their singular vision.

This is a positive IMHO.

There's a pretty strong anti-capitalist theme that comes up a lot.

That's true. Time will tell if things like sub.club are able to move forward

The federated nature of things means people can find their own instance to call home, one that suits them and their kin

I'd call this, the power of community

without losing access to all the goodies of the wider network.

And this, going global.

Is this a value? What is the word for it? Self-actualization?

I think this is usually termed "having the best of both worlds".

I should point out though that this isn't entirely true. I don't think that we can really say that this applies to folks who made their home on exploding-heads or lemmygrad, for example.