but the transparency, evolvability, standards based architecture are all aspects that would much accelerate finding solutions
I don't really see federation improve on that all that much, but maybe I'm just lacking in imagination.
if they did do a more thorough research of how it is setup they would know that some very simple choices have huge calming effect: e.g., not showing the number of "likes" on the timeline and not allowing "comments" on reposts. and those are just tiny interventions in the scheme of things. having open source codebases that can be forked but still interoperate via activity pub means that a fragmentation, speciation, niche creation will happen organically which will further reduce the phenomenon of irrate digital mobs
its not like people don't have imagination, but a "system" that sucks in XX billions of profit per quarter acts as a black hole: any light-ray of hope is crushed back into its reality distortion field