Fediverse/Mastodon meta
We can't even teach instances like picking an email provider because nobody chooses their email provider anymore. They're either in Gmail or they're on a company provided Microsoft Exchange or Google Apps domain.
Teaching federation requires a fundamental social change in the way we treat the internet, a damage caused by the last decade and a half of deep centralization of services. That's not Mastodon or the Fediverse's fault, but it inevitably impacts it.
Fediverse/Mastodon meta
And, meanwhile, big corporations are going to try to extinguish any attempt at this because a proliferation of federated technologies will end up destroying their empires.
Fediverse/Mastodon meta
I also argue that, were cloud platforms to be ultimately eliminated from the internet, we would see a resurgence in federation as it would become technically necessary again.
That will likely not happen any time soon, though.
Fediverse/Mastodon meta
Federation as a technology has been superceded by large corporations with enormous amounts of resources to throw at commoditized server space, but the social value of federation has not gone away, and somehow we have to re-teach that before we can really do anything else.