I don't fully agree with your assessment. While it's true that very few people seem to "want" federation, I think a lot of people want smaller communities. Man

I don't fully agree with your assessment. While it's true that very few people seem to "want" federation, I think a lot of people want smaller communities. Many pseudo-redditors are only on the site because of its small communities. The niche stuff. What used to be forums dedicated to one craft, which have kind of re-gathered on Reddit because it's easier to just create a micro-community like this than to bother setting up your own forum/instance/whatever. Same reason Facebook groups are popular. But also, smaller communities benefit from a much healthier signal-to-noise ratio. Tildes (https://tildes.net/ https://tildes.net/) for example is invite-only and has remained a healthy, high quality discussion & content platform through the years because of exactly this. HN is also kind of in that boat -- and people tend to complain how the HN community growing degrades the quality. I do see it as well, though the fact it has two full-time paid and incredibly dedicated moderators helps a LOT. I believe the rugged UI also helps.