I found myself chatting with my dad and brought up the topic. I couldn’t come up with any actual advantages a federated platforms had. The main reason I use any federated platforms is because they’re either not as enshittified as the alternatives or run by huge dickwads. Since it mostly fits those criteria, I’m on Bluesky too, but once that goes I’ll either switch to another un-shittified platform or Mastodon.
But on its own, what advantage does a federated social media have?
No single entity can ruin it. We’ve seen that happen over and over when someone’s political or economic goals conflict with user interests.
BlueSky actually talks about this quite a bit, viewing the company as a potential future adversary of the current developers’ goals. I’m not sure their design choices align with that in practice, but they articulate the argument well.
Another cool thing is the broader reach federation provides. Someone with a Wordpress site need only install a plugin and people can follow it with Mastodon and the like. Tag a community in a post and it shows up on Lemmy too. This is underused so far, but I hope to see it continue to grow.
I’ve only just begun on this, but my next software project is to rewrite my blogging software to use ActivityPub, especially for comments.
I use a variation of this approach to display fediverse comments on a statically-generated site. It does involve a manual post to Mastodon, but I’m not very inclined to redo the whole site.