Genuine inquiry . Maybe I am not experienced enough with the various federated platforms but I am an avid user of matrix, and have dabbled in lemmy. From what I have seen is federation is on the path to decentralization but not fully there. It creates fiefdom, little kingdoms . Great yes you may find one that suites you better, but users now can end up isolated to their island, switch island sure but now you are isolated for the previous island and maybe others. Its stupid. On matrix you need to know the other island(server) to even find its rooms(communities). Some rooms block users from one server while others block users of other servers. You either have to run multiple accounts or accept the limits. Add in you are at the mercy of your home server, you can lose your account have it immitated, and more. The performance is horrible not sure why, but content is slow to update and spread. Matrix has the problem because of its design most people are on the matrix.org server and so the point of federation is largely lost. They are moving to p2p where it seems the solutions for federation now dont apply.
Anyway why is federation not stupid? Are these problems only with Matrix? Cause I look at lemmy and it seems far worse.
I want to be clear, that I disagree with his "federation is stupid" point, but email has problems right now.
Theoretically it's federated, theoretically you can spin up your own mail server and self host.
But even if you do that absolutely perfectly (SPF, DKIM, DMARC etc), you can falsely end up on spam list, that effectively block delivery of your email to large segments of the network for days if not weeks.
Whilst theoretically federated, email falls under the broad dominion of google, microsoft and a couple of other large players.
As a cybersecurity pro who primarily deals with email security right now (in the sense that there is basically none)
STOP
CLICKING
LINKS
I mean yes, but that's not a federation problem.
To completely strawman AND slippery slope what you're saying:
Agreed, dangerous, I don't want numpties doing it.
But it's a large part of why I have a car.