That's what Mastodon is. It looks good and is about as easy to sign up for as it gets with a federated network. I don't think there's much demand for it. A lot of people seem to overestimate how relevant decentralization is to the vast majority of users.

The inherent complications or disadvantages of decentralization aren't worth it for most people.

It's easy to sign up but then you don't know what to do because you have no way of finding people you know on the fediverse. Any social media platform that has had any semblance of success had at least one of the two ways to bootstrap your social graph: either by importing your contact list from somewhere else, or through global search with enough parameters to find someone by name and city. Mastodon has none of this.

This is one of my favorite thought experiments, except in my version it is guaranteed that nobody can moderate anything, ever. My best guess is: There is a threshold for how much of a problem something can become before congress makes a law prohibiting "access" to this network or running the client, or any analogue thereof. Then there's another threshold at which the government ratchets up resources for real enforcement.

In short, the conclusion I always come to is that no matter what the math and the game theory say, if the legislative, executive, and judicial all agree that it's a big enough problem, it's dead. There's nothing technologists can do about this. At least, this is the conclusion I always run into whenever I've tried to brainstorm technical solutions over the years.

It'll immediately fill up with pirated content, porn, porn of dubious legality, spam, and harassment, ensuring that all the normies would stay on Facebook.

It'll be a social network for people who were banned from all the other social networks, which is not a great town to live in.

it could, but the internet in general is like this and everyone still uses it. imagine if user/content discoverability is impossible without a fingerprint or token.

It also sounds difficult to curate (just another kind of moderation), and much of the success of the current social media heavyweights is due to their curation.

It's a fallacy. Good social media platform doesn't need curation. It doesn't need any recommendation system whatsoever. Every single thing you see in your feed is the result of your conscious decision to follow someone. It's just you and your friends. And exactly zero content from people you don't know.

Current social media doesn't respect you because being respectful doesn't drive metrics.

Tor?