For me at least, I found here the same kind of content I used Reddit for, so as long as these stay around I have good reason to do so.

I also like the federation "movement", (imo) it feels more cozy and enhances the sense of a community.

I remember the before fore times, things spread fine, you talked to your friends fine, you just didnt have immediate access to rooms full of millions, you actually had to say something worth being shared to such a scope (esp the times when its sub-optimal to not be able to plead to the masses). Federation can fix a lot of the obvious issues with that older setup. The protocol could have been established then, we already did it for email and newsgroups.

And with enough federated servers in the network they could never hope to have the reach of things like Lemmy and Mastodon. Server costs would be massively spread out instead of reliant on one corporation.

thats ok, big tech cant really make money off this anyway, the proof is in the pudding, just let us run our space, go throw some crap on billboards and on our video streams. its insane we need brokers and gatekeepers for simple formatted text messages.

Be careful with that thinking. That way can lead to complacency. Big tech loves embrace, extend, extinguish

I could see a corp like Microsoft or Google or someone else seeing long term value in federated services. They could create a service utilizing the technology and spread it to their user base. Slowly add in some special sauce to their own version of it to attract more people to their part of it. Then break compatibility with everything else to stop someone from stealing users back.

Be the change. If few people actively try to build an alternative the network effect will do the rest.