Pretty much yeah, either the fediverse or Usenet. Somebody pointed that out to them in the comments of the linked post but they dismissed the point as nonsense.

Very performative anarchists over there lol

I'd like to see a more completely decentralized implementation, but federation does seem like it's practical in that it's easier to implement and use while still having a lot of the benefits of decentralization.

Ideally I picture something like a lemmy application that runs it's own internal, persona instance, but I'm not sure how the protocol would deal with that many isolated instances.

Keeping an eye on things like holochain and locutus to see if one of them will end up being a viable protocol to build a fully decentralized forum app on.

In the mean time I mostly like lemmy because it's written in rust. Postmill looks cool, feature-wise, but I can't see myself contributing to it when I it's written in PHP. I already have to use too much PHP in my day job. When I come home I just want to use an enjoyable language.