Federation is the future because politics demands it. As more and more social media platform turn into an intelligence gathering and an information warfare tool, countries around the world will make stricter laws to restrict the current American and Chinese owned BigTech moats of social media platform. We are already seeing this with new data privacy laws or stringent restriction or even outright banning of the platform (as China has done). This is a huge headache for American and Chinese government because such restrictions impairs their current online intelligence programs. The obvious solution is to partly sacrifice the profits of the BigTech to keep the data flowing. We'll soon find inter-operability being forced on platforms (like iMessage or WhatsApp). More "open" protocols will be pushed and standardised slowly to make it difficult to impose political restrictions and weaken privacy laws (because the message will be that BigTech are no longer in control, but "the people" and every government wants to spy on its citizens). Just look at email to realise how these things eventually end up - how many of you run your own email servers, and successfully ensure that your mails aren't bocked by "spam" services? Federation is good and necessary. But we are now decades past from the idea of "controlling our data".
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I actually think it's exactly politics that will make federation impossible, with the exception of a few big players who have the deep pockets to fund major moderation. For those people (big tech), you're right interop will be mandatory.
There's no way government are going to give up the control they have with big tech and companies that can be regulated and served warrants and stuff. The last thing they want is for individual decentralized citizens to be able to stand up their own systems and discuss dangerous ideas[1] without oversight.
On top of that, big tech will be eager to push things like Web Environment Integrity[2] and Private Access Tokens[3] that can ensure that unapproved (or semi or fully anonymous) actors with dangerous operating systems like linux aren't allowed to participate, at least on a first-class level. It will be packaged as "anti-spam" or "a better user experience for our users" but the fact that it massively empowers the tech companies and enables them to further entrench you into their walled gardens will absolutely not be an opportunity they want to miss.
[1]: The definition of dangerous ideas will depend on who and which party is in power. Unless the corporate overlords end up in control, in which case it will be what their managers consider dangerous.
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Environment_Integrity
“Turn into”? They were explicitly invented for surveillance and personal data mining. That’s their entire raison d’être.
Federation solves nothing. The problem with the current generation of social media is quite simply the profit motive. Elon Musk tried to make a big deal out of being a free speech absolutist, but his company is run for profit and any time free speech butts up against profit, profit wins. Federation's only advantage is that the profiteers haven't invaded that space yet, but Bluesky is loudly telegraphing that it will no longer be a safe space and they intend to start monetizing it.
If you want to a shining example of effective content moderation, public utility and centralization, then just look at Wikipedia. What's different about them? Non-profit.