Auster

No one cares about servers

I’d like to see the source for that.

And even if it is/was true, looking at what came before, you’d just be paving the path to become that which you were against.
If one is to depend on a single element, when it fails, it becomes the failure point for the whole ecosystem. Like with the instance I originally stuck to, Kbin.Social, where, if was the sole instance of the federated forums, when it died, the “fediverse” as a whole would have died overnight.
Also, a centralized platform is far easier to be taken over by either good or bad actors, and at least with fragmentation, when you notice degradation in one of the pieces of the fediverse, you can easily jump to a platform that hasn’t been compromised while not having to build the community and groups from scratch.
Sites with specific niches and scopes that still allow for integration, and the culture that ensues, are also an alien concept on a centralized site, and what takes over basically becomes the face of the site’s ecosystem as a whole. With the federation/defederation system, however, it’s much easier for a site to build its own ecosystem while letting in and out just enough of/to other instances to oxygenate it.
And lastly, like with email and Linux, while some may be rather passionate to defend it, I think that, despite that, it’s still a technology, or at least an idea, with great potential, even if slow but constant, as, once more, anyone can make instances in their own vision, or join a platform that better fits what they need while not making a walled garden to force users to stick to it.

And if the user uses Mbin instances, he/she can even block posts that link to other domains, as often political posts link to news sites.

And some times, having the initiative to create such more specific communities could be a change factor for the growth of a social media. Also, with federation, not just the person can choose where to create the community on while not making it a walled garden as other sites would still have access to it, but also if a community for the given subject already exists but the user thinks he can do better, he/she can more easily do it with how expansive the “fediverse” is.

Growth is a process, not an immediate switch. Every social media started small and then grew. If immediatism, or however it is called, was the predominant factor for any struggle to become an achievement, nothing would be achieved.

And on lack of contents, I, for one, block everything that is not of my interest, quite a lot to be honest, specially with certain niches spamming the federated platforms, but even then, I get a feeling I should trim even some of the communities/magazines I follow/subscribe to as I can barely catch up to those already.

While I think fragmentation can grow into being a problem, trying to standardize things too much can be problematic too, as the developers would be bloating the software for features that the community may use very little, as well as, by consequence of the bloating, the devs being either limited to a design that needs to take into account the quirks of all object formats, or to make some frankenstein monster design to include those different formats.

A more reliable path, I think, is what Kbin (RIP) and its successor Mbin do, to have a section for articles and one for notes. While it’s still more load on the developers and the servers, at least it shouldn’t be as much as having to make sense of multiple formats together, since the two sections don’t directly interfere with each other. This, on a final point, is, to my understanding, and with their respective proportions, what happens with the Linux family of operating systems, where it’s also pretty fragmented, but every once in a while a way to put two different environments together appear, like Wine and Xfce translating Windows and QT5 programs, or AppImage and Flatpak trying to be as universal as possible by depending on as little default dependencies from the host system as possible.

Something I’ve been thinking about is that changes only happen organically, so I think it’s good to not be an insistent advocate for a platform X, Y or Z. Instead, I think that perhaps it’s better, instead, to simply use the platform the person is more favorable towards whenever possible, and if people then share something worth sharing, it should slowly bring people over. And regarding the annoying part, at most, making a note about technicalities and the type of people in the site could be good if discussions the person is engaged in allows, and if the person didn’t burn people’s patience by being pedantic.

From the little I have seen, there seemed to be quite a few on Misskey instances, though I don’t know how representative it is if compared to, e.g., X/Twitter, where most of the artists I would find were at.