I'm not objecting to federation as such, I'm objecting to the belief that users want to become federation evangelists in order to engage in social conversation. It's limiting the uptake of federated services because it forces users into making a meaningless-seeming choice before they can participate.

When I show a site like Lemmy to my non-technical friends, their eyes glaze over and they are confused by the necessity to choose an instance and the inability to make any kind of meaningful comparison between them. This is the exact same reason that Mastodon has never really taken off.