I still think it's really important that federated media networks exist because:
- It's way harder for a single bad actor (i.e CEO) to fuck everything up in the name of profit chasing
- They're useful for weaning people off of the mono-platform hell that the modern internet has been forced into and reminding people how websites used to work and still SHOULD work
- Open standards for internet communication can last for ages even with moderate adoption. No one can "take down" the concept of IRC or E-Mail, even if huge mono-platforms have done their best to try and get everyone on a single service for them. You're still usually able to take your data and set up elsewhere using the same backend service, and that's a critical difference. Sure it really sucks when your Masto instance goes under, but it's a hell of a lot easier than losing a proprietary site
- Federation makes it much easier to archive content when much of it is already stored across multiple independent servers run by different maintainers
The whole debacle of Reddit's execs burning down the website recently made me think about this more since the same network of micro-communities could be achieved just by a bunch of individual forums networked together with a single-sign-on tying them together. like how forums worked in the 90s and 2000s, just with the option to network them together and not having to make a new account for every community.
