So I managed to log into one of the 3 accounts I'm sure that I have still. And I'm a software nerd who makes "educated" decisions all the time around this stuff.
Protocol People really care about that, and you know what? It becomes their network effect. But it is a self-selecting network. The nature or design of what effects and attracts the network is the same mechanism for limiting its size.
TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat all focus on things that other people really care about—namely video creation, photo curation and ephemeral small network cohesion. and those focuses attract other userbases.
Probably, there's a lot more people who want to create and watch short videos than there are people who want to nerd out over what their 1/10,000 servers' community rules and protocol settings are.
The federated stuff is unsuccessful not just because of protocol stuff (if people really wanted, they would find a way) but because it's not cool yet.
The only reason people go on those networks is to try their luck at popularity and find a way to cash out in various manners. Other than that, there is not much point going on there, why would you waste time broadcasting all kinds of things you do instead of just doing more...
We only think of computing as "personal" at all because of that brief period in the 70s when very simple toy computers, just powerful enough to run a spreadsheet and play some basic games, became affordable.
But computing was invented to solve wartime problems of various kinds, including ballistic calculations, warhead design, cryptography, and intelligence analysis.
Almost immediately it moved into corporate accounting and reporting, and commercial science and engineering.
It took thirty years for it become "personal." Its roots are corporate and military, and it was never - ever - suddenly going to give those up.
Worse, a lot of open/free/etc "solutions" are built by people who like tinkering, for other people who like tinkering. That's fine when you're making an OS for a web server, but a disaster if you want technology that's open from the POV of the average non-technical user.
You can just about, now, start to imagine an anti=internet which is distributed, secure, non-corporate, and controlled by ordinary non-technical people telling smart agents what to do.
That might, just about, with many caveats (it's not hard to think of them), become a technological solution that builds a true decentralised network.
But for now we're stuck with corporate centralisation. And that's not going to be fixed by going back to 8-bit micros, or with a Linux phone.
That’s it. Both Open Source and Federated thinks that distribution gateway federation something is something a user must know and be fond of. The user not only couldn’t care less but actively refuses this complexity because they cannot trust their own uneducated decisions. They go for the nearest CorpThing that seemingly just works for everyone and decides everything for them after they tap “Next” a few times.