That's part of the point, though — can a federated service become easy or self-managing enough for people to run without needing sysadmin expertise? Drew's poi

That's part of the point, though — can a federated service become easy or self-managing enough for people to run without needing sysadmin expertise? Drew's point is that people who can have or acquire that expertise are force multipliers — it's easy _enough_ that one person can run a node that carries less-technical users into the ecosystem. But I don't think we're really there yet, and worse the value isn't there in federated social media to offset the costs of time, money, and change. We've seen distributed networks capture enough imagination and be usable enough to get mass adoption, but they did things like distribute tremendous proprietary media libraries on the cheap and without permission. Services like Mastodon aren't as easy to spin up for a group as, say, running Napster was, or even seeding a torrent is now. But people, even non-techincal ones, either put up with those services' occasional unreliability or recruited more technical users to work them on their behalf because the relative value was so great. So to me the problem with federation is making the value exceed the cost. It's a squeeze from both sides. We won't get there until an ActivityPub service is as easy to stand up as running an app on your device, AND the value of running one is large enough to make it worth the trouble. It feels like messaging should be where the value end should have already taken off, but federated group chat is still a rat's nest of incompatible or feature-starved services. Federated social is still just on the wrong side of complexity and the value it provides honestly isn't that great to a mass audience.