> We don't think federation is beneficial to Revolt and would actively hinder our stance on privacy. In short, federation is prone to leaking your metadata, could make removing your data harder, and we otherwise have no incentive to develop support if it we aren't able to use it for the main platform (revolt.chat).
You should mention the big red warning box above that text:
> Hold on, this article is quite old at this point, just a few things to keep in mind:
> - Federation may end up being part of the project in some capacity in the future, just at the moment it is not part of any feature (at least publicly) on the roadmap.
> - The complexity and time arguments below are still valid but may be necessary to tackle in the future.
> If you have some general ideas on where and how federation could be implemented, feel free to drop into the Lounge #Revolt Development.
Tough love coming then -- then unless we pay you directly, there's no good incentive for anyone to believe that you'll be able to always deliver your claimed advantages over Discord.
It's self-hosted FOSS, you're not paying anyone directly and if you don't feel it delivers something you can write it yourself or pay to have it written.
Anyway, this gets into a philosophical point about the whole Reddit exodus - ID federation and content federation are two different things, and when people talk about the friction of joining a forum vs clicking subscribe on reddit, ID federation is what gives you that, not content federation.
And content federation introduces a lot of scalability problems, and difficulties deleting comments/etc. Yes, someone can notionally always crawl/cache you, but having it on your server is different from intentionally putting it out into a peer-to-peer CDN, or serving it to a bunch of different pods so they can put it in their members' feeds. Some people don't want that part, they want the content to stay on their self-hosted instance.
Identity federation is dead because most apps only support a handful of oauth providers aka Google or Facebook or Apple instead of letting you choose one yourself.
Identity federation also runs into the problem that oauth, etc don't let you have the same account on multiple oauth providers as a backup in case one of them shuts down.
This is disingenuous considering there's plenty of Lemmy servers that aren't federated. Just because a thing supports federation doesn't mean it must be federated.
If Revolt supported federation it would be trivial to just turn that feature off if you had privacy concerns in that regards.
https://developers.revolt.chat/faq/federation