Honestly these all seem like solvable albeit hard problems.
Learning curve is a ux problem. Yes federated is a bit harder, but i think this is more the general problem that open source is terrible at ux, especially when it doesn't have sonething to copy, not a fundamental federated issue.
(Cross-instance) Authentication - definitely hard, but seems solvable as well. Whether with fancy crypto or maybe some federated oauth thing.
SEO - meh, who cares. Do people really use these sites for googling. Also seems like could be solved by getting everyone to shove some rel=canonical all over the place.
Personally i think the fundamental issue (as opposed to just engineering challenge issues) is that its hard to modify/adapt federated protocols. I very much agree with moxie's critique of federation at https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ . Everything else is a simple matter of programming - an inability to rapidly iterate is on the other hand is an unsolvable problem.
Learning curve is a ux problem. Yes federated is a bit harder, but i think this is more the general problem that open source is terrible at ux, especially when it doesn't have sonething to copy, not a fundamental federated issue.
(Cross-instance) Authentication - definitely hard, but seems solvable as well. Whether with fancy crypto or maybe some federated oauth thing.
SEO - meh, who cares. Do people really use these sites for googling. Also seems like could be solved by getting everyone to shove some rel=canonical all over the place.
Personally i think the fundamental issue (as opposed to just engineering challenge issues) is that its hard to modify/adapt federated protocols. I very much agree with moxie's critique of federation at https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ . Everything else is a simple matter of programming - an inability to rapidly iterate is on the other hand is an unsolvable problem.