Federation in Social Networks

Federation actually makes no sense.It's not a global network like twitter; you are under the mercy of the admins of the node you are on.You might get suspended without an option to pull your data and migrate to a different node.Nodes can cut each other off if they don't like each other's politics.So you can't just joina a node and be on the network. You have to find an instance that aligns with your politics.

Yup, federation can only work if the parts actually connect to one another. Isn’t Trump’s TruthSocial build on some federated protocol too? But if you connected your node to it, everybody else would shun you.

Federation does not solve the problem. Eventually most users will flock towards single most popular instance of a federated service. Email is federated, but most users betray it by choosing the most popular provider (Gmail). And Google will happily drop email federation "to protect users from spam" when they get enough user share as they did with XMPP.

Being able to set up your own server is not federation unless your users can communicate with users on other servers.

Interesting read, have you ever used federation? It looks like it's built for exactly this purpose.

What will you do when enough users move to federated/decentralized platforms?

What distinction do you mean? Federation allows for interoperable decentralization. Without federation, we would have thousands of chat/mail/social media servers that can't talk to each other. Some may choose not to federate, but most want to federate to create a useful protocol.

You mean, federated systems like the web or email won't succeed ?

Yes. This IMO is one of the 3 key issues with federation as it is now:1. Noone understand what "federation" is so they all flock to the big servers hence making the majority of the system totally non-federated in nature2. Findability (of users, topics, servers) is terrible which pushes people to 1)3. What you said. Until there's such a thing as federated identity, we're all still tied to one server, thus one server owner can ban / switch off / over-moderate

You certainly could do it decentralized, but I suspect federated is the better fit.