I think the silver lining to the cloud of Elon Musk buying twitter and taking it private has made people realize the shortcomings of not just twitter, but the whole social media ecosphere. Your access is controlled by a corporation, and once you've posted something, your words belong to a corporation.
@pbx I think also, that federation is really just an implementation detail that nobody really has to care about. Email is also federated, but nobody really cares about that, just the fact that you can send an email to anyone with an address. The difference is that when most people first got internet access, the ISP would run an email server so that everyone just automatically got an email address.
@pbx The problem with centralized control for internet-scale technologies in 2022 is that it's too expensive to run without a whole bunch of money coming in from somewhere. The only way to introduce a new service today without a whole bunch of money to back it up is to design a federated protocol for it.