Is anybody really surprised that a social media corporation didn't make it their utmost priority to allow their userbase to connect out of their proprietary platform?
As I understand it, the protocol has the ability to decentralize built in. But the technical requirements are prohibitively high to the point only large businesses or corps could afford to do it. I also believe (someone correct me) the company hasn’t switched on the functionality yet.
The biggest thing is that you need to be manually authorized by them for federation. They will only ever federate with servers that arent serious enough competition to lead to democratization of the overall network.
Last heard (a few months ago) the cost is in storage. The protocol isn’t too complicated now, but it generates a shit ton of data, and IIRC you need a minimum of 3 copies.
Storage is cheap whwn it comes to webhosting and 3 replicas is honestly not much when it comes to enterprise standards. I think cloud storage providers like backblaze keep something like 9 copies of data across different mediums
The "ability" to decentralize has costs that scale quadratically. So in every practical sense, it cannot be decentralized. At best it could have a few servers that participate.