I agree that decentralization would be great for social media because anything successful would have to solve some interesting problems that would push social media forward as a tool.
Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, email etc all have fairly complex vocabularies for curating your experience:
These concepts caught on because they were presented in a gradual, simplistic way, even though they represent the workings of a complicated organism.
Basically what I'm saying is that Federation may be one more layer of complexity, but the vocabulary is already present for users- they've had a pretty long tutorial on social media. 99% of social media sites are aware that user growth requires removing friction and that includes typically dumping people into a "default" area, then allowing them to customize their experience. I think this kind of funnel would be necessary for federation, even though a "default experience" is kind of the antithesis of federation.
Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, email etc all have fairly complex vocabularies for curating your experience:
Domains, Subscriptions, Hashtags, Likes, Subscriptions, Downvotes, Bans, Replies, Subreddits, Groups, Posts, Retweets, Follow, etc.
These concepts caught on because they were presented in a gradual, simplistic way, even though they represent the workings of a complicated organism.
Basically what I'm saying is that Federation may be one more layer of complexity, but the vocabulary is already present for users- they've had a pretty long tutorial on social media. 99% of social media sites are aware that user growth requires removing friction and that includes typically dumping people into a "default" area, then allowing them to customize their experience. I think this kind of funnel would be necessary for federation, even though a "default experience" is kind of the antithesis of federation.