In what ways is this different than today’s world, where depending on what you want to do (connect with people with similar interests, talk to friends, look at cat videos) there’s a bunch of options for what service to use?
The services available today don't federate with one another. I can't reply to an Instagram post from my Reddit account, or send a message from WhatsApp to iMessage.
While I'm not sure parent's suggestion is feasible or would solve anything, it is more like the AT&T breakup in that the system is still cohesive, even if operated by separate entities.
Those services don’t, but as a Mastodon user, it doesn’t seem such an unlikely suggestion. I have been impressed with fediverse since I joined about a year back, and love the that the feed isn’t manipulated, and that censorship is often the choice of an individual not wanting to see more from a user they find objectionable or from a community/server level when say your server doesn’t want pornographic posts from some other server on fediverse, which frankly reflects sincere human interaction much more than Facebook moderation and their feed algos, and if you did want to see what your community doesn’t, you can both stay and also create an account on another server if you wish.
Federated social media for me has been much less toxic in terms of discussion quality and is much less addictive, I love checking it but I don’t doom-scroll to oblivion…
But server doesn’t get payed to make me doom scroll to oblivion so incentives are much more aligned.
If you maintained the same social graph on each service, you'd still have all the misinformation being shared amongst the same graph members.
Its one thing if the content being served is what some nefarious actor wants a group to consume, for influence sake. Its another when its the content produces and consumes themselves. The current misinformation discourse on FB is the current culture, especially the culture of a large group of people. It originates both on and off FB. 'Q' didn't originate on FB, it originated on 8chan, let that sink in.
While I'm not sure parent's suggestion is feasible or would solve anything, it is more like the AT&T breakup in that the system is still cohesive, even if operated by separate entities.