Curious to know as more people embrace Federation and Mastodon if there's any alternative platforms to look out for? I don't think Mastodon should necessarily hold a monopoly on what comes next. I'm experimenting with writing something from scratch (https://m3o.org) but am also interested to see what's out there that might be otherwise used.
The thing that Mastodon is highlighting is this move of communities to their own platforms that might be interconnected rather than just one giant centralised server governed by a corporation. I think from an end user perspective this isn't going to be vitally important but because mostly technologists drive bottom up trends it might become more prevalent. Email is always the thing to point to. So I don't think people will all necessarily run Mastodon servers but equally this may be the starting point for lots of new communication protocols.
From a business perspective, why would anyone run a Mastodon server? The best answer I can conceive of is reliability. But reliability also implies an interest in "private" communication and/or moderation.
The bottom line is this --- "federation" is not incentivized in any obvious way that I can see. Am I missing something? Lacking this, network growth and long term viability look questionable. It's really a charity operation with people asking for donations to cover costs?
How well does this model work for open source?