Unfortunately, this perspective seems very head-in-a-bubble to me. It's a tiny tiny number of people who think the problem with Twitter and Substack is that they aren't federated. Federation isn't a feature people broadly care about. If it makes the platform work better, great! But I don't think that's the case for Mastodon or any other federated platform I've come across. It's the opposite, they make concessions on the experience in order to support federation. That would be ok if those sacrifices were for functionality people really want, but federation just ... isn't that.
I disagree. Federation is a feature people want, but they don't know about the concept.
When I show people that I can talk to Signal, WhatsApp, and Signal through a single app, they're pretty impressed. I wouldn't expect most people to set up a Matrix bridging system like I did, same with most Mastodon servers, but it's a feature people do generally want.
With Mastodon, most people first ask "but how do I follow people on Twitter", which often leads to pointing at bridges that may stop working at any point and have no official status, and often get blocked on small servers because of the overwhelming wave of moderation spam they cause.
Phone manufacturers back in the day used to have quite commonly used "social hub" apps that would combine various social media sources into a single UI, but they were all tied to their own brand that either got too difficult to maintain or lost the phone wars (HTC and Blackberry had quite well-received integrations if I recall).
The past years we've been stuck with a locked in ecosystem for so long that the mere idea of two different apps interoperating has become inconceivable to the mainstream.
I hope the DMA, which will force messenger apps to interoperate, will bring back the knowledge that it's possible to do so at the very least.
> I disagree. Federation is a feature people want, but they don't know about the concept.
I think they want it, but by an order of magnitude more, they want simple UX. Everything else is a distant second. UX is the foundation upon which everything else is built. Without an excellent UX, the audience will forever remain niche. I tried to just sign up to Mastodon, and it was a clusterfuck of proportions so unbelievable that I can't believe it has as many users as it does - and it only has a couple million users.
Federation is someone doing a cool card trick at a cocktail party. Does it look cool? Yes. Is anyone going to go out and buy a deck of cards the next morning and learn how to do it? No.
Federation is the core of the internet and that has taken off, so sure they do. Email and phone numbers took off, isolated ISPs all died out.
We're getting some form of federation of messengers and other technology companies deemed "gatekeepers" by the EU. Companies serving large user bases won't have a choice, so there's no need to go out am buy anything.
I think this has "because" and "despite" flipped. The internet took off despite federation, because it let people do things they couldn't otherwise do.
But reinventing something that everyone can already do (eg. tweeting) with federation is not a winning game.
