I found myself chatting with my dad and brought up the topic. I couldn’t come up with any actual advantages a federated platforms had. The main reason I use any federated platforms is because they’re either not as enshittified as the alternatives or run by huge dickwads. Since it mostly fits those criteria, I’m on Bluesky too, but once that goes I’ll either switch to another un-shittified platform or Mastodon.
But on its own, what advantage does a federated social media have?
Think of federation as potential redundancy for data and discussion. Individually an instance of whatever platform you’re using can be great, bad, or start off nice and get worse, but as long as there is federation of the good parts of communication among the people, there’s going to be somewhere else you can go if your first source goes downhill. It’s not perfect, but it’s far better than a single location where users are at the mercy of whoever runs and controls it.