Genuine inquiry . Maybe I am not experienced enough with the various federated platforms but I am an avid user of matrix, and have dabbled in lemmy. From what I have seen is federation is on the path to decentralization but not fully there. It creates fiefdom, little kingdoms . Great yes you may find one that suites you better, but users now can end up isolated to their island, switch island sure but now you are isolated for the previous island and maybe others. Its stupid. On matrix you need to know the other island(server) to even find its rooms(communities). Some rooms block users from one server while others block users of other servers. You either have to run multiple accounts or accept the limits. Add in you are at the mercy of your home server, you can lose your account have it immitated, and more. The performance is horrible not sure why, but content is slow to update and spread. Matrix has the problem because of its design most people are on the matrix.org server and so the point of federation is largely lost. They are moving to p2p where it seems the solutions for federation now dont apply.
Anyway why is federation not stupid? Are these problems only with Matrix? Cause I look at lemmy and it seems far worse.
Too many FOSS projects suffer from this problem of a gatekeeping design for newcomers. This also flows into UX. When you try to solve these problems, those people crawl out of the woodwork claiming “security/features > some <slur> UX change”. When UX does not improve, they would sit silently and blame it on people not finding things easy, and tell them to git gud.
Lemmy and Mastodon are growing massively, and so is Matrix, proving an easy UI and easy signup allows platforms to get accepted well by masses. XMPP is here since 2 decades, I use it daily and I am in a bunch of groups, and I see problems all over the place.