Federation in social networks, why it's inevitable

At the end of the day it's web-of-trust moderation. White/pass-lists and Black/block-lists and experiments with various graylisting techniques in between. Sources of spam get moderated/untrusted, perhaps fractionally and incrementally. Spam was never a problem for people who used whitelists of contacts that go to their main inbox with everything else going to a check-once-in-a-blue-moon folder if not /dev/null.

Also, 'microblogging' is stupid. Add a feature to make a default display have a message size limit, with a one-click away from 'more' and you can support both users with not much to say, and lots to say.

Finally, I consider the widespread prohibition of home/mobile servers by ISPs to be the real impediment. If that barrier were removed, development would happen exponentially faster. As in 5 years ago we'd have had stuff way better than we will in reality 5 years from now. The development that goes on with the w3c's blessing is political distraction from the field of opportunities to experiment everyone should have with their ordinary home/mobile internet service. The internet is and should be more than just http/s. It should be a place where people are free to develop and experiment with new protocols without having to negotiate permission from their ISP/gatekeeper.