The pandemic really did accelerate the enshittification of everything after it pushed everyone into online ecosystems. Shareholders want to keep that market and turn all that captured data into profit, especially in the face of the uprising of LLMs.

Unfortunately one major PR problem with the dismantling of those entrenched ecosystems is explaining that the Fediverse is fundamentally NOT the scam infested Web3 envisioned by absolutionist techbros. Even the word ‘decentralised’ has negative connotations now. We need a coordinated marketing/narrative push (compare it to email servers for the boomer managers) and offer pre-built Docker images for companies to host. That could really change the tide of things when LTS builds exist with little to no barrier to entry. Sell the prospect of corporate PR departments controlling their own first party news published direct to reader’s feeds with no loss in moderation control on either side. It would be a huge boon for everyone.

TLDR: Federated services very much could be the next era but we still need much more people, including companies, on board to reach critical mass.