[jmyeet]

I'm honestly shocked how often I still hear technical and educated people argue that the solution is federation.

You know what services we have that are federated? Phone (POTS), SMS and email. You know what services have a massive problem with spam, fraud, false positives on detection of the aforementioned, ID spoofing, etc? The exact same services.

People ignore the real reason Wikipedia is successful: ownership. It's also worth noting that Wikipedia isn't federated either.

We have the same issue with ISPs in the US. The best Internet is municipal broadband. The national ISPs are pretty much universally despised. Again, what's the difference? Ownership. With municipal broadband, the residents own the broadband. National ISPs exist to extract wealth from customers while doing the least possible and lobbying for legal protections against competition.

It's almost like the best results are achieved when the workers own the means of production. Someone should really look into that.