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I expect that if federated social media takes off, nobody (among the mass market) will know that it's federated, just like email. It'll just be, like you say, a

I expect that if federated social media takes off, nobody (among the mass market) will know that it's federated, just like email. It'll just be, like you say, a couple of big sites that happen to enable people to communicate with people on other sites (and also a handful of wizards who self-host). I think the killer feature of federation in general (particularly in the context of social media) is that it decouples user account administration (and by extension, data collection) from the network effect. I run my own node that just has my account on it, but I can still benefit from the network by federating with other nodes.

sanderjd 3y ago
I agree that this is what it will look like if it takes off. But then those "couple of big sites" will have all the same incentives / problems as the current mass market sites, and will themselves be enshittified eventually. The model needs to somehow result in distributing the user load and thus the costs across many hosts such that it is a bearable cost for each individual host without requiring any deep pocketed support. But you and I are in agreement that that doesn't seem like the likely outcome.