We must be talking about slightly different things here. Sure the data all has to be stored somewhere, but I'm not arguing for everyone to have a local copy of

We must be talking about slightly different things here. Sure the data all has to be stored somewhere, but I'm not arguing for everyone to have a local copy of all of Twitter just so they can search it. I wasn't pushing for federalization at all, and honestly its a bad fit for anything similar to social networks IMO. Federalization doesn't work well if the goal is universal reach, why federate the network graph when you still want to access all data on the network? The fediverse won't work at scale, the sheer amount of data duplication and network traffic would be insane. Even if we could somehow find a way to handle all the traffic, it sure seems like that would fly in the face of environmental efforts so many are onboard with (storage and bandwidth aren't cheap at that scale).