@unaspenser the federation is also the past of social media, and it has been difficult for the usual suspects to get any traction here. Advertisers. Mainstream politicians. Corporations. That might be because it was just too small for them to be bothered, but also in the federated model the architecture of the system makes it hard for them to get their usual stranglehold.

The silos are hierarchical. If you pay the right man then you can get a higher position and be able to spam or alter the timelines of millions of users. So far that hasn't happened in the federation, and if it did I expect it would be rejected. Like the body identifying and rejecting an invading pathogen.

In the past, the federation was mostly about the voices of the marginalized. The people who for one reason or another were rejected or censored by the silos, or who just never trusted them to begin with and so remained on the open web. The numbers are growing though and so the demographic will change. There are already complaints about that.