Comment by jmyeet
Why do so many tech people push this "federation is a panacea" idea despite all evidence to the contrary? I don't get it.
First, the obvious: if federation was clearly superior, it would've won. No medium since email has been federated and even that's dominated by a handful of players. Running your own email server is... nontrivial.
Second, users don't care abou tthis. Like at all.
Third, supposedly tech-savvy people don't seem willing or able to merely scratch the surface of what that looks like and how it would work.
Fourth, there's a lot of infrastructure you need such as moderation and safety that would need to be replicated for each federated provider.
Lastly, zero consideration is given to the problems this actually creates. Look at POTS. We have spam and providers that are bad actors and effectively launder spam calls and texts. You need some way to manage that.
If the better, truly good thing was always also the winning, "superior" thing, we would live in a very different world.