I’m only speaking for myself here, but I see federation as a means to create a large platform that isn’t controlled by any single entity. Whether or not federation will be useful depends on whether there will be posters, and who those posters will be. Federation lends itself well to social media applications because social media is driven by users creating accounts and posting. Any change in state - be that a new post or comment being created, something being upvoted or downvoted, something being reported, etc - fans out from the server it happens on to other servers that are federated with it. Contrast this with what OP mentions their friends do with their website: “[T]hey have them only to publish contact info, opening times, and a couple of photos of their business.” In this scenario, what data would be getting federated? These sound like static sites.

It could be that OP is asking for something closer to a business’s facebook page. In this case, some federated software might be better suited for their needs than others, but I don’t think that’s the same thing as a corporate website.

How would federation help with this usecase?

why not fediverse facebook/myspace/carrd?

I think Friendica fits that bill.

I wonder if any spies got drawn into protracted shitflinging like the civilian Twitter?

I can’t see your point. The point of fedi is to not be locked to a single implementation. If one software is proprietary and does not allow you to host your own, you can just use another you like.

That’s basically what I’m getting at. Part of the point of the fediverse is being able to choose both the software you use and the instances you use. I presume that the fediverse compatible instagram app will only be hosted by Meta. If someone is interested in getting into the fediverse for the freedom and choice, why would they use the new instagram as opposed to another fedi software with a similar feature set, such as Pixelfed like you pointed out?

Can people create their own instances of this app? Even if it can interoperate with other fediverse software, if this ends up being yet another big tech platform where your only choice is to use the one hosted by Meta it defeats the point.

Something I’ve not noticed while using the fediverse that isn’t touched on in the article is the role of what I’ll call “middle ground” instances and communities. You might be on instance A and visit a community on instance B. Someone from instance C is also visiting the community on instance B. If no one from instance A searched for any communities on instance C, and likewise for the reverse, users on the 2 instances might not see each other anymore even if the instances are federated.

I use lemmy from lemmygrad and see accounts from instances that I might not think to search for had I not already come across them.

Money probably.

Gotcha. I saw the link to the instance in the OP and thought that was what you were talking about. My bad.

I think there might be 2 different instances being talked about. The one with rules for hate speech is ioc.exchange. The other one ua fediland one another user mentioned in this thread.

Maybe I only took a brief glance, but the instance seems to be for infosec professionals. Nothing stood out to me as chuddy on the explore page, and I saw no mention of freeze peach in the instance’s description. They even have a rule against hate speech.

This doesn’t seem to be a freeze peach absolutist chud instance like wolfballs.

this project makes it a lot easier for most folks to harm Elon

You say that like it’s a bad thing.