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?
Good point: Look at lemmy - kbin - piefed. The guy behind kbin thought “lemmy is nice but I could make something better”, and then whoever is behind mbin saw that and said “I can make kbin better” and forked it. But without starting over in terms of connectivity or content! And now we have piefed which is on the edge of being even better and it’s still introperable. The power of that can’t be undersold.
I think that’s basically the whole point. Or if someone would rather use Mastodon - look, the lemmy userbase is there as well!
Piefed, Mbin and Lemmy aren’t necessarily aggressively competing like X and Bluesky are. It’s moreso friendly cooperation. Sure, if the fediverse was a bit more commercialised, you’d have competition. But it would be fairer competition based on how good your Software and ethics are and not on who else is also using the app.