My hunch is that it's technically possible to go not just federated but radically distributed. However, there's more money to be made in centralization, creatin

My hunch is that it's technically possible to go not just federated but radically distributed. However, there's more money to be made in centralization, creating defensible toll booths. And right now the sorts of developers and protocol/system architects who could make a radically distributed alternative are now fully overemployed doing other lucrative or beneficial things. So it's a little harder technically, and lot less lucrative, to make a radically distributed alternative. And whatever the abuses of the centralized proprietors, they're still not changing those tradeoffs -- most users and even platform participants can still make-do under centralization. A big tech bust freeing more talent to work on ideological (rather than pecuniary) projects, or enough heavy-handedness from the centralized proprietors, could change that balance.