Federation tech is cool from a software-engineering perspective, but almost useless from an average Joe perspective. Centralized services have much better UX,

Federation tech is cool from a software-engineering perspective, but almost useless from an average Joe perspective. Centralized services have much better UX, i.e. due to a universal search mechanism and aren't as confusing. Try explaining to a non-techie that there's that cool thing called Mastodon, but there's also Pleroma that works with mastodon, but there is not one instance but many people hosting many servers, oh, and to use this whole thing, you don't get the Mastodon app, but you have multiple apps for multiple platforms, each with a different name etc. Oh, and the whole thing is also sometimes called Fediverse. Also, each instance has a completely different website and rules, most of those are small and can disappear any day, and your whole account will disappear with them. If they grow large enough, the monetization issue will eventually become evident. There are two solutions, forcing users to pay, making most of them unhappy, or selling their data, and now we are back to square one. Also remember a lot of admins push their political views on all users of the instance, much more aggressively than any mainstream platform. Blocking Gab, an instance often associated with racist content, is very common, nevermind the non-racist users on there. Same for basically blocking off Japan as a whole, just because the japanese sometimes post their anime child porn, which is legal over there. Oh, and what are those weird addresses? Well, they're kind of like email... So if they're like email, why don't we use email instead? And so it goes. Most non-techies don't really care about privacy in the "now I see more personalized ads" sense. They don't want their future employers / partners / parents to see their messages, that's why Snapchat and sending content that automatically disappears has become so popular. The Fediverse actually sacrifices those "important" kinds of privacy. Basically, As long as you let open source clients in, your recipient can do anything with your messages with little friction, and that's not what users usually want. For most users, Facebook spying on their stuff won't really have a material impact on their lives. However, if they get into an argument with the admin of the instance (assuming a friend is hosting it for them), the consequences can be severe. Imagine if i.e. your techy friend hosted all your social data and then discovered you had an affair with his wife. He could, as revenge, publish all your embarassing photos and direct messages. This sort of thing just can't happen with Facebook. Matrix is quite different, the UX is much better, it's great for enterprises/education/govt, so it doesn't matter that much anyway, it's filling a previously unfilled niche (easy, realtime chats between organizations) and lets governments control their data. I think it has a moderate chance of success. Mastodon, however, is, quite frankly, a failure. There's definitely a need for a free-speech-respecting, censorship-resistant social network, but the fediverse is not the right approach.