The issue in my eyes is that things like Mastodon are pretty well designed for what it is. A main feature of ours is the personalization and separation which we could have hacked into such a protocol but ends up being a worse experience for the majority of the users. Personally I wouldn't want to use a fragmented network to connect with people I know in person (Friends, family, co-workers), but I have no issue with it for online communities. In the end though, I think fragmentation doesn't help simplicity and simplicity is what the majority general social network user is looking for.
> Why would you build an open source, federated product?
Is your question "Why would you make your users able to verify for themselves and make sure using your service is actually private when you sell it as a private service ?"
Why would you build an open source, federated, mastadon like product? None of these things have led to great success for social networks have they?