I highly doubt that. Each federated node is fairly expensive to host since it basically needs a complete copy of everything on its peers.

I think the future is distributed. You connect to others, and if the network is large enough, each piece of data only needs to exist on a faction of the nodes to be safe from disappearing. Just think about it, across your various devices (laptop, phone, tablet, desktop, etc) you likely have a couple TB available, and your can buy cloud storage for any extra space you need. And you don’t need to always be online either, it’ll sync when two peers are online at the same time, so it’ll be eventually consistent.

The main barrier here is NAT IMO, you need to be reachable for it to work. That’s getting resolved with IPv6, but it’s rolling out really slowly.

I would say the future is in pooling resources.

Like it happens with torrents. As one p2p protocol very successful.

Self-hosting not applications, but storage and uniform services. Let different user applications use the same pooled storage and services.

All services are ultimately storage, computation, relays, search&indexing and trackers. So if there’s a way to contribute storage, computing resources, search and relay nodes by announcing them via trackers (suppose), then one can make any global networked application using that.

But I’m still thinking how can that even work. What I’m dreaming of is just year 2000 Internet (with FTP, e-mail, IRC, search engines), except simplified and made for machines, with the end result being represented to user by a local application. There should be some way to pay for resources in a uniform way, and reputation of resources (not too good if someone can make a storage service, collect payment, get a “store” request and then just take it offline), or it won’t work.

And global cryptographic identities.

Not like Fediverse in the end, more like NOSTR.