I mean, there is a model that works, it's Discord. Small self-associating groups from various parts of our lives. TBH that's so far ahead of facebook - humans draw meaning from being in groups where there groups are small enough to know and have repeat interactions with people. Facebook is an ocean and it's unstructured (Google Plus or whatever had user grouping, which was an advancement imo - you can say "that's a work person" and interact with them in certain ways) unless you go out of your way to set it up like that. Discord really just works amazingly well for that, I have tons of hobby groups and game groups where I've known people for a super long time and friend groups from whatever community. Kids have the "school chat discords" and if I was in college we'd have had study groups on it I'm sure, we had FB groups then. No reason you can't have a "family discord" too (so uncool, mom!).

Mastodon basically is (or could be) that as a protocol, if you want to treat it like that. Dress it up in a discord-like client and get it onto phones/etc and make the user-story good. People already show they'll pay to self-host discord servers etc, so come up with a cool "Algo" style ansible deployment thingy that makes it super simple, just fires up a server on an AWS account for you and gives you a link you can send to your friends etc. Congrats, you are now the Underwater Basketweaving Enthusiasts Discord Server. Not everybody needs to run a server, but, make it easy enough that people can do it. And as a user, just join the discords you like and let the server op run it.

https://github.com/trailofbits/algo

What exactly does Twitter do in this business model, though, lol? And how do you get there? Twitter's "broadcast" model is nothing at all like that. I guess they're gonna... throw it all away and start fresh? Seems like that's what's happening I guess.

But I guess I just don't see the value in federation generally, to the end user. Pods aren't authoritative, they're meaningful and human-generated, so oauth type stuff doesn't really matter. Why would I want to "cross the streams" between my home and work pods, or let BP come and mine/advertise my server, etc, if I'm the one running it? Consistent cross-discord-instance identity is all I really want from social media, at most and that doesn't need to be tied to this at all, you can do that via google auth or some other idp that solves that problem. Where is the revenue stream in this at all?

And if you just want a service where you click it and it runs in a hosted instance by a cloud provider... well, discord exists, and dropbox remains popular even in a world of NASs, etc.