[zaksingh]

The biggest challenge I see with federated systems is the discovery process for finding a node you want to be associated with. This is a hard choice - will this server still be running in 6 months? How is it funded? Is it being actively maintained?

These questions are too much for laypeople, and I can't imagine a scenario in which your friendly local system admin is your service provider for a critical service in your life like Facebook. Could you imagine email working that way?

I see federated systems naturally ending in centralization in the form of a couple big megacorps that the average person trusts to not shut down tomorrow. Convenience and ease of use will win out. It happened with email, it arguably happened with xmpp back in the day. Change my view?

[ddevault]

There's no evidence of this happening with, say, Mastodon. The culture is different, and isn't changing. If we know what we want and what we don't want from the start, we can keep centralization from gaining a foothold.

[kixiQu]

You can migrate a Mastodon account and the old server will forward on your follows.