In the end, the problem sex workers have on the internet is that they are a huge fraud risk, with that risk coming from both the provider and the client. The mainstream payment providers won't touch it as a result. The less mainstream ones are expensive and still not easy to do business with.

Without easy setup of payment providers, federation is difficult. Any new instance in the federation needs to go through the same pain.

Meanwhile, what does federation actually solve? The only fans model (and most sex work) seems to be a social graph that is a single producer talking to a bunch of clients. The producer needs a server, clients need to connect to that server, where does federation come in?

Disclaimer: I'm not at all knowledgeable either - literally just know what I've read on hn on this subject.