Adoption and low friction is the most important thing. Unfortunately, copyright makes it illegal to parse web pages without the parent entity's consent, and the CFAA makes it illegal to download them. This means that a low-friction mechanism to break the corporate stranglehold on communication is extremely unlikely, since it can't do much to ease transition between providers.
If we didn't have these restrictions, this would be a purely academic debate, because there are already many practical ways to extract information from a resource and transmit it to other computers.
"Federation protocols" are a way of volunteering this information in a common language, but there's no real technical reason that's necessary to get "decentralized social media" or other such things. They're only considered potential solutions because effective scraping is not allowed.
Decentralized / democratized information access is not an issue that can be solved technically. It needs to be solved socially (primarily because the necessary technical infrastructure already exists, and is just held back by legal anti-solutions).
If we didn't have these restrictions, this would be a purely academic debate, because there are already many practical ways to extract information from a resource and transmit it to other computers.
"Federation protocols" are a way of volunteering this information in a common language, but there's no real technical reason that's necessary to get "decentralized social media" or other such things. They're only considered potential solutions because effective scraping is not allowed.
Decentralized / democratized information access is not an issue that can be solved technically. It needs to be solved socially (primarily because the necessary technical infrastructure already exists, and is just held back by legal anti-solutions).