You counter "it makes deployment difficult" by "lay people won't be deploying, it's too difficult". I can't understand what you're trying to say at all.
People are deploying Mastodon, it will keep being an actually-federated network, and Bluesky can be a centralized could-have-been federated network run by a couple of companies. But is that the goal as you see it?
My counter is rather "deployment was already too difficult for laypeople even without that", see the emphasized word:
> In fact the requirement for domains and certificates has been always the single biggest hinderance, which inherently prevents self-hosted deployments in masses.
I'm confident that you never satisfactorily answered to that, and even more confident in my belief that such hinderance is inherent and thus should not be the foremost design factor. Unless you have a clear answer that can be universally applicable (that is, no "works for me and my friends", I too have enough technical friends who don't use Mastodon), please refrain from trying to claim otherwise.
Answered what? I'm sorry that you can't figure out certificates, I don't see how that excuses a system that is made more complicated that it needs to be, and more complicated than anybody else does it, which was my initial claim. Again, you are still giving me more "it's not that bad" or "it's not the main issue", which are not reasons to do the thing wrong in the first place.
This "conversation" has reached my threshold for puzzlement, so I'm dipping out. Let me show you how it feels to me with an analogy:
Some company is making a new revolutionary car. It gets about 10 miles of autonomy, can only turn right, and stalls every 100 feet. I point that out in the comments.
Then lifthrasiir shows up and says that some people have driven it successfully, that you can get anywhere by only turning right with careful planning, that most vehicles don't get a lot of autonomy only cars and trucks, that there are commercial services that will get the car where I need it to (by loading it on a truck), and anyway if I really want to get somewhere why don't I take a bus?
Sure, I never claimed that it couldn't be moved, or that it would prevent its owner from getting places. What I said is that it's a terrible car.
You are claiming that a tram is a bad car. It was designed in that way for a reason and you can't (or don't want to) understand it because you like a car so much. Whenever I say a vehicle, you misinterpret it as a car. Of course it would make a bad car, like your analogy. That's enough puzzlement for me as well.
People are deploying Mastodon, it will keep being an actually-federated network, and Bluesky can be a centralized could-have-been federated network run by a couple of companies. But is that the goal as you see it?