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What is federation in this context?

Does not federated mean not using a jailbroken phone?

Or is it related to how the app is installed?

Or the underlying infrastructure relying on a central server instead of distributed?

Federated means everyone gets to pick which server they use, including one that's specific to just that one user.

To expand in case it isn’t clear... if you have a federated client it has to work to a standard, a backdoor at the client could be added on one app but probably not all the options. If you were trying to hack a system like this and they don’t use a federated client, the only option is the “official app” and authorities could have taken control of that, added a backdoor, and pushed it out as an update.

This could still happen with any one or two or multiple federated apps, but the changes at a lot less likely this would go undetected.... then again... I have less faith in the “many eyes” theory of these things since HeartBleed was an OpenSSL flaw for years and that was open source no one ever noticed.

Open source is more of a minimum requirement not assurance of quality.

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