The long story short is, the future is always going to be federated no matter if you like it or not.
There are literally BBSes, IRC servers, and Hotline servers running to this day and Hotline is dead old tech made when random hacker kids making proprietary shitware still was a thing. XMPP might have been abandoned except as part of Cisco Jabber (TM) which has been neglected by everyone except the US Government it seems (companies love Teams (tm) as of late) yet online you'll find guys running ejabberd and connecting to it with Gajim/Conversations.
Meanwhile Cohost is like a bad fedi instance the second they run out of money. "Sorry guys, we're out of money, too bad, and you can't even get the source code lol".
@Pawlicker Oh I absolutely remember, I actually found preferhuman back in 2010-2011 and it introduced me to a lot of stuff, no doubt the reason I got into IRC and forums later as well