| I'm probably going to turn this into a blog post but this is the outline of my take on what federation is good for: * different people have different needs from social networks * starting new social networks is hard becasue getting a critical mass of users is hard * people would have social networks that are better tailored to their needs if there was a larger diversity of social networks * centralized platforms target the average of everyone which doesn't serve anyone very well * there are two ways to get critical mass: piggy-backing off an existing network or trying to bootstrap one from friends/family/interest groups * piggy-backing is awkward because the upstart network and the established network both want to kill each other in the long run, but think they can get value out of each other in the short run * federation can provide the benefits of piggy-backing without being adversarial * if it's the case that each person has a social network that's right for them that isn't right for that many people, then federation can be a stable equilibrium |