Maybe Bluesky has "won"

Whatever one's feelings about these microblogging services, one truth that has become clear is that none of them -- X, Bluesky, Threads, or anything similar -- should be considered "the commons". They're private businesses with their own motives that are often in complete conflict with your own.

A lot of people made the mistake of treating Twitter like a commons and have been burned. My local police force posts all notices about traffic, missing people, foiled crimes, etc., on Twitter out of inertia. That is wholly inappropriate, and wasn't appropriate even when before it become some brain-worm infected oligarch's rhetoric megaphone. The same goes for many organizations, politicians, and so on. It was never the right choice. And the solution to one bad choice isn't to move to the same mistake on some other service. These people and orgs need absolute and complete ownership over their own platform.

Mastodon / ActivityPub seems like it might scratch that itch, but what a bloated sloppy mess that is. The right idea, with the wrong implementation.

Honestly would prefer all these people and places just published RSS feeds.

The fediverse very much is "the commons", at least it's as close as you can hope to get online.

Personally I believe there should be an ActivityPub equivalent of Wordpress for blogs - something so trivially easy to set up your own instance that your dad could do it. Everybody should be able to make their own instance that they can control and plug into the wider ecosystem. At the moment its an extremely strange and confusing mess of a dozen or so instances that are trying to centralize into "one true" Mastodon instance, which is never what the fediverse was supposed to be.

But it's not because each node is still controlled by someone who can choose what's on it and who has access

Which is why it isn't each node that is the commons, but the entirety of the ecosystem.

You're collateralizing bad mortgages and rating them AAA.

I think the central question is how people can collectively own a node and organize its decision making. Federation of dictatorships is not a democracy, it's feudalism.

You're in danger of making the perfect the enemy of the good.

Email is far from perfect, but good enough and its federated nature means it's reasonable for institutions to use it as a default mode of communication and authentication.

What exactly is the alternative to federation? Is it possible for everyone to be their own admin?

In any case, under feudalism serfs didn't have the freedom to choose and switch their feudal lord as they saw fit.