It seems that this federated service falls into the same asymmetry that others have—everyone is joining the flagship instance (which negates the decentralization).
Consumers want centralisation. All of this stuff is too complicated right now for end-users. In an ideal world, my data would live on the instance but as soon as its mutated a local copy is sync'd through the browser/app. That way it's my data, and if the instance goes down, I can choose to sync it somewhere else. Ideally this would be packaged up in one application, so for different kinds of "sites" the mechanism fo…
Consumers want to not care about the details. Most people don't care much about federation, p2p, full decentralization or centralization, until something crashes. As long as they have no problems, they would even play with the devil.
Centralized solutions, tend to be easier in usage, faster, and with a more stable moderation who maintains the peace. This is something decentralized solutions can't easily replicate, but it's not like it's impossible. It's just that so far not many are trying to climb this mountain, because implementation and maintaining of centralized systems is also easier.