Yeah, sorry - I wasn't trying to come across as a negative nancy.

I think, historically, Mike has done a lot of work developing a lot of his own solutions that work for him - some of which are fairly novel, and remain unparalleled in other federated applications. He's done most of the heavy lifting in making his platform work, and consequently has had difficulty in finding other developers to help build the platform. 

But I think he's generally had some disappointments in attempting to work with other platforms in the past - Friendica and Diaspora have had to work on moving past a series of long flamewars with one another. 

I personally would really like to see a cross-project collaboration bear fruit - but things like privacy and identity management are absolutely worth considering on a protocol level - there are many things that Zot and MagicAuth can do that other protocols currently don't demonstrate.