Federated social media isn't weird or too hard for a layperson. Email is federated, with hundreds of possible client softwares and thousands of possible servers, if not more! All these manage to interface together with dozens of strange arcane protocols. And yet, it is wildly successful and used by both the most technical people and the least technical people alike.
Concentration of email providers and clients means most users are not touching the "federated" part, and the federation continue to shrink.
@soller
I want to believe this good story. I've also barely convinced anyone with it.
I have tried to set up personal mail servers. Setting up a mail server had been quite technically challenging until recent years, requiring installing multiple components and tweaking configurations. After the technical hurdle, a new mail server has to overcome being considered spam by many existing servers. Then it has to overcome being spammed.
A plurality of businesses just throw the problem to Google and Microsoft. The trend is growing too.
“While self-hosted domains switched to providers across all categories, more than a quarter of them changed their mail provider to Google and Microsoft,”
https://today.ucsd.edu/story/IMC2021_savage
The client side is worse. From, ironically, a spam sender's data, webmail is 99% Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook; mobile is 95% iOS and Android default.
https://www.litmus.com/blog/email-client-market-share-february-2022/
In the end, "Nobody Wants to Run Their Own Server".
https://notes.alexkehayias.com/nobody-wants-to-run-their-own-server/
