Genuine inquiry . Maybe I am not experienced enough with the various federated platforms but I am an avid user of matrix, and have dabbled in lemmy. From what I have seen is federation is on the path to decentralization but not fully there. It creates fiefdom, little kingdoms . Great yes you may find one that suites you better, but users now can end up isolated to their island, switch island sure but now you are isolated for the previous island and maybe others. Its stupid. On matrix you need to know the other island(server) to even find its rooms(communities). Some rooms block users from one server while others block users of other servers. You either have to run multiple accounts or accept the limits. Add in you are at the mercy of your home server, you can lose your account have it immitated, and more. The performance is horrible not sure why, but content is slow to update and spread. Matrix has the problem because of its design most people are on the matrix.org server and so the point of federation is largely lost. They are moving to p2p where it seems the solutions for federation now dont apply.
Anyway why is federation not stupid? Are these problems only with Matrix? Cause I look at lemmy and it seems far worse.
The slow-ness is definitely a Matrix problem only, other federated systems are in fact often faster then centralized systems as they can distribute the network load more evenly. Try XMPP and see how fast it is :)
I will try xmpp. Matrix is horrible, pics and vids take forever, chat can seem to lag for 10minutes at times! You would think it could be fast, like just distribute the content but its not and I think the servers are overloaded hence p2p is needed
Which instances did you try? In another comment you mentioned Matrix.org as home server, which might be part of that problem.
several and performance varies room to room. Can you recommend a fast server?
If you already tried several and had varying results in different rooms, can't really recommend any, although I have made a wiki page with a super small list: https://wiki.tilde.fun/guide/messenger/matrix
It's good if they're close to you geographically. There's a ping bot which is mentioned in Matrix blog's TWIM segments, maybe one of those?
https://matrix.org/blog/category/this-week-in-matrix#dept-of-ping-