None of this federated stuff will ever gain mainstream acceptance. I would bet my house on it. It adds multiple layers of complexity and a ton of UX trade-off, and doesn't solve any problems for a typical user.
What I do imagine will happen is that one instance takes off, gets itself a board or VC to answer to, removes activitypub, runs away with the win
Tech people will be mad but overall nobody will be able to do anything about it as they'll just ground-up rewrite eventually. The users won't care about the drama at all
Money is a bastard
I'd love to be wrong on it and I'm not just sitting here doom'n and gloom'n, I'm trying to ActivityPub-enable all of my projects as it happens! I do believe it's something to watch out for though
Any instance which did this would be totally forgoing the network effect of being able to link up w/ other instances. So this is quite unlikely, at least in most cases.
See also Google talk, Facebook messages, literally any other thing that was once open access ever by a big company. That racist Twitter gab is an isolated Mastodon install last I heard if you want to see this in action, though I wouldn't recommend going there
I remember seeing the first Web pages at CERN, clicking through them a bit and being unimpressed. You sound like me back then.
Mentioning "Federation" as a feature will not be very appealing to the average user, indeed. It is more of a technical concept. But there are features that derive from an app being federated.
Ever heard people complain they were suddenly banned for no apparent reason, and have no means to get it fixed? In a federated service you may just go to another instance (and in future migrating / controlling your own content will be easy).
A big centralized platform has a single ToS, and algorithms throw random people from the entire userbase at you. In a federated system you can choose a server with rules / ToS that appeals to you. An individual server is like a community with own culture and topics of interest.
Wanna escape ads, algorithmic driven UI? Choose any federated server (currently fediverse is ad-free). Server adds ads later on? Migrate to one that does not.
it's a world view that does not click with how i view software development & progress. i see long term stewartship as hard, see most walled gardems eventually succumb to acceued bad decisions or events that they become saddled with, or poorly steered into, or simply not aligned with their users on. federation isnt an answer to a problem, it is the theory that many problems require more than one ultra-massified uber-answer. federation says that problems and their answers require experimemtation, require adaption. it believes in protocols to agree upon & communicate across people & communities with. federation is freedom to generate new interfaces & extend capabilities.
i think it's dangerous to only ask "what can help the user now". technical environments need to be diverse & potentiated, need to have creative possibilities open. federation gives us both a quick, well known, easy to adopt, easy-to-host users & communities basis, and gives us the liberty to keep exploring further. i would trade these liberties for no products, and i think users over time will see how trapped they are & appreciate living life not under the auspices of ultra-massified software titans, but instead, with smaller, more adaptive, more community based (but interoperating) federations.