Centralization due to ease of use IS social media.
Without the centralization, why bother? Without the monolithic environments it's all private gardens. There's no point going and standing in someone's private garden while they're away.
It's seeking of the public square that is generating this situation, over and over and over again. This mess IS the territory. Either there's a way to have best of both worlds, or some kind of 'both worlds, in a compromised way', or this will always happen and this, too, is the territory: all public squares will be bombed for one reason or another until they're gone.
The whole point of federation is to connect these private gardens to each other. So you avoid the disadvantages of both (1) big centralized walled gardens that are not sustainable as "public squares" due to enshittification, and (2) tiny individual instances. This is very similar to how email and the Web work. It's why we use the internet nowadays instead of just dialing up to Compuserve.
Without the centralization, why bother? Without the monolithic environments it's all private gardens. There's no point going and standing in someone's private garden while they're away.
It's seeking of the public square that is generating this situation, over and over and over again. This mess IS the territory. Either there's a way to have best of both worlds, or some kind of 'both worlds, in a compromised way', or this will always happen and this, too, is the territory: all public squares will be bombed for one reason or another until they're gone.