Not your point, but federation is often heralded as some must-have feature for communication around here, but we already have that: XMPP does that, even with encryption. Or Email with PGP. Or even the old Textsecure code, as Signal/Textsecure started out federated, but, surprise, that didn't help adoption.
This is an explicit design decision. It used to federate, and they found that to be terrible, so they stopped, and now it's better.
Maybe you should find something else to fight against.
https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/
Worth noting: Google Talk used to federate, via XMPP. They found that almost nobody actually used the federation functionality, and something like 99%+ of the federation traffic was inbound spam.
Federated protocols aren't very good, and don't evolve.
Compared to the number of GTalk users, a bunch of self-hosted users probably didn't count for much.
> and something like 99%+ of the federation traffic was inbound spam
I heard this too, not sure if it was the only reason.
Too bad Google doesn't know how to manage spam. Good thing they don't have any other federated communication products. /s
> Federated protocols aren't very good, and don't evolve.
What makes you say this? XMPP has come a long way since 1999 and is still evolving to this day. Even email is slowly evolving. Is Matrix not evolving? HTTP isn't really federated, but Moxie also mentions the web being stuck on HTTP/1.1, because HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 don't exist.
It already is.