It is par for the course, and it is also the thing that'll keep federated networks from succeeding. Look, I don't like or trust Facebook. But how many custome

It is par for the course, and it is also the thing that'll keep federated networks from succeeding. Look, I don't like or trust Facebook. But how many customers would Fastmail have if they defederated from Gmail? For that matter, how much would Gmail have grown if they had decided not to federate with Hotmail and Yahoo? If people can't use your service to talk to or follow friends & family on other services, they'll just use the services their friends & family use. Sure, they could use both, but why bother? The one that isn't huge has little or nothing to offer them. I'm all for letting users of federated networks set up their own personal blocks of users, nodes, entire services, whatever. But when admins defederate, it blocks all good communication, too. And turns the federated network into an unfederated non-network. > Don’t like it? Make your own fediverse node. Sure. And when you do set up your own fediverse node with the intent of actually staying federated, you will quickly find yourself with a de-fediverse node, as admins punish you for daring to let your computer talk to the computer of someone they don't like. Edit: To be more clear, I am NOT saying that fediverse nodes want or need to be huge like Gmail or Facebook. I'm saying that convincing people to escape the walled garden into the fediverse is mostly not gonna be possible without a demonstrated commitment to keeping the network connected. It'd be like trying to convince someone to set up their own email server, when nobody they know will ever see their emails because Gmail dumps it all into the spam bucket. What Gmail has done to the idea of a personal email server, the fediverse is doing to itself, self-inflicted.