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Heres the thing with federation
It will always be more complicated, and lead to smaller segregated communities. This mitigstes the network effect social media services rely on
The consumer lockin then monetization lockdown cycle always sheds users. I think eventually most federated systems will gain users, albeit slowly.
This only works if a new centralized network doesnt take its place, Blueskys existence kinda proves thats not always the case
The proof is that mastodon user base is steadily going up. There hasn't been a giant spike in a while but the barrier to monetization is too high for it to shed users from that. Its more like how wikipedia has outlived google as a resource despite wikipedia not being particularly better now than soon after it started.