I think a lot of these criticisms are pretty fair in terms of user experience, but I’m more optimistic about federated services.

On matrix you need to know the other server to even find its communities

Can you think of a good alternative that doesn’t fall victim to the issues of centralization? e.g. All communities are registered with a community index – but doesn’t that community index have a responsibility to hide hateful communities?

(I think distributed, curated community lists could work here – which could be a feature where you can see the communities / rooms / magazines another user is publically subscribed to.)

little kingdoms

I think this is a real concern, more than people are giving you credit. I lost my vlemmy.net account this week – it’s unclear if the admins could have prevented this (I bet I would do a worse job!), but it’s a situation of bad stewardship / “lordship” :) There is also the issue of political defederation.

I think the answer here is self-hosting, which I think solves all the issues you mention (let me know if I’m wrong). Self-hosting is not free in money, time, or knowledge – the PC side of me wants to say that this makes it not a viable solution for people in need. But another side of me thinks that - at some point - there is a cost to using a service that needs to be paid: either pay in self-hosting, or pay by serfdom.

performance is horrible

Can you be specific? I know Matrix folks are working on sliding sync to manage some big performance issues. https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals/pull/3575

I think performance will never be 1:1 to a VC-funded, centralized tech company, but I don’t think federation inevitably means “horrible” performance (but maybe someone with more technical knowledge can weigh in).