Yeah, after watching this dynamic repeatedly over various projects, I've come to the conclusion that federation is a feature, not the feature. Mastodon is not t

Yeah, after watching this dynamic repeatedly over various projects, I've come to the conclusion that federation is a feature, not the feature. Mastodon is not the first federated network by a long shot: StatusNet kicked this all off and is more or less dead, same with RStatus and a few others. Moreover, there's multiple ways you may want to federate a service: ActivityPub, Matrix, pump/tent (dead?), IRC, even, and you're probably better off tweaking your own protocol to fit your app versus trying to adapt your app to fit the protocol which can be hairy. You've gotta build a really compelling service first and foremost (otherwise, why bother), and then add federation later. The danger of that is it's really tempting to just skip the federation part if you get big, but it's a critical part that shouldn't be forgotten, but only after you've got a great app people are using. I'm watching Mastodon to see if this belief is wrong and it ends up taking off, but I think there's a real danger is designing for nerds and getting small time success and validation with nerds and geeks (this is not derogatory fellow nerds), because what we want is not what matters to most people and you risk biasing your community (the Google+ effect, though it happened there for different reasons). The idealism has to be matched with hard pragmatism. Maybe one of these projects will do that.