What strikes me quite forcibly is that although federation is obviously A Good Thing for content / control, and also A Good Thing for nerds who like the elegance of the protocols - it really, really isn't A Good Thing from a user point of view.
Straw poll amongst my (non-nerd) friends reveals absolutely zero understanding of what federated might mean - but more importantly a total confusion when faced with a paradigm which is completely at odds with anything that has come before. Searching Site1 for content that happens to be on SiteN makes no sense to people who spend their time on Insta / Reddit / Twitter.
It ultimately won't matter if a user doesn't actually know that their content is federated to/from a number of other platforms - but the UI, the words, the descriptions of what "federated" is are terribly, terribly confusing. Per the words of someone on Reddit: "If you need me to read a 10 page document explaining how to use this new type of Reddit, I'm out".
I think there's a blindspot here, and until someone figures out a nicer interface and way of talking about all this stuff, it's going to scupper any possibility of serious migration of users onto these platforms.
Thoughts?
The big problem, IMO, is human, and no amount of tech is going to solve that.
At least Reddit is big, what does the alternative social media bring to the table, that is not a dream of becoming something they themselves sabotage every time they have the opportunity.
I'm not going to invest my time into comunities run by crybabies. Centralized social media has it's problems in this regard too but at least they put huge content in front of me.
I've been researching alternatives to reddit lately, and I already found drama between Kbin and some Lemmy instance because some kulturwars I don't give a flying shit about.
I live in a world surrounded by people that has, most likely, different political opinions than me. My friends, my GF, my family, they all have very conflicting opinions about many items, yet we get along together. Why can't you do the same with a fucking forum, you dimwit.
The second thing to realize is that federation is a superset of centralization (it includes it as an edge case). People are used to centralization thats why the main mastodon instance is much larger than everything else. But with in a federated architecture there is not intrinsic obstance to developing more diverse patterns.
So just conceptually thinking federation will "win". But how exactly is not clear. Efforts in this space are still grossly underfunded, in some cases overly ideological, distracted by web3 and always too influenced by the walled gardens.
My feeling is that the most interesting cases will develop around federated wordpress and reddit-alternatives. These will be driven by creators and publishers in specific domains that want something less oppressive and value-destroying of their work.
The average user/consumer is indeed hopeless. They are just shoved around and abused like sheep and they take it because there is no obvious / easy alternative or any warning from trusted entities.
It doesn't matter how hard you push, nobody wants to risk getting hacked, and will stick to the "safe" sites.
It doesn't have to be this way, if you're old enough, you remember the days of shareware floppy disks in the 1980s, when it was reasonable and safe to try anything you wanted. (Why.... we had a very strong and reliable de-facto version of capability based security with our write protectable floppy disks and lack of hard drives) Genode, and GNU/Hurd could get us back to that level of safety, but it's going to be a long, long time before that happens.