If you use a private website for your social media we just loop back to where we are right now in a few years. Even if it seems great now there will eventually be enshittification.

When someone asks me if I'm on facebook, I can say I'm on The Federation, has a nice ring to it

It is a shame that this is now a reason on the table to avoid sites like this.

I don't care if a SM service is federated, switching to another isn't a big deal. I switched to Lemmy when I got annoyed at Reddit, and I just spent an hour or so shopping around for communities and was basically done with the move.

On Reddit, I would delete and recreate my account every year or two for privacy, and that was more effort than switching to Lemmy.

I'm sticking with Lemmy because it feels like Reddit but without a lot of the noise. The noise will come, and there's a decent chance I'll bail when it does, it just depends what kind of noise it is. I don't link my accounts with other federated services because of privacy reasons.

I'm actually thinking about building a lemmy alternative, and it will likely not be part of the fediverse. Maybe I'll build a bridge at some point, but I really don't see much value in ActivityPub. I'm more interested in decentralized services where the majority of content is stored and served by the device used to access the service (i.e. a handful of gateways to facilitate connections, and that's it). With that kind of setup, federation with other services isn't very important, since authentication can be separated from the service itself so you get the benefits of "one account everywhere" without actually needing services to communicate.

Regardless, Lemmy solves my need for aggregated news and community discussion that Reddit did, and until that changes, I don't plan on leaving.