ok @tef has a good post about the social and technical problems with federation that i want to pick out a specific point from and run in a further tangent than makes sense to me as a reshare-with-comment so this is a standalone top-level post but you should go read their post too.
Federation isn't about giving users freedom, it's about giving nerds a sense of control.
imo this is also true of Free Software™ going all the way back to "RMS wants to write better printer drivers". any time you see an apparent tension between the stated goal of freedom and the actual actions the FSF and its orbiters take, you can resolve that tension by thinking in terms of control for nerds.
kernel blobs? on one hand, including them gives users the freedom to use the hardware that they already own. on the other hand, they represent an absence of control for nerds. strip em out. linux-libre time
gcc AST dumping or whatever it was? on one hand, it gives users the freedom to plug more things in at various points in the compiler. on the other hand, those things might be non-nerd-controlled. can't have it, fuck you, oh no why does everyone use clang now
rms being cancelled? on one hand, being free from sex pests doing sex pest shit. on the other hand, he's a nerd. he's gotta stay, fuck you
(open source is about free shit for corporations more than either of those)
