XMPP federation certainly is authenticated, so that your identity to other servers on the network is never in doubt. As for social media controls, you certainl

XMPP federation certainly is authenticated, so that your identity to other servers on the network is never in doubt. As for social media controls, you certainly can publish items only visible to e.g. certain groups of people, unsure if that's what you meant. XMPP is not the narrow subset of XMPP that Pidgin implements, but sadly that's how most people are familiar with it. Projects like Movim for example provide a much richer view of how XMPP can also be used for social media. Personally I'm a fan of ActivityPub if it gets more people federating. It's not impossible to bridge the two protocols (we did that in the past with OStatus, the previous iteration of federated HTTP social networking).