There is no "Federation" in Fediverse or Mastodon
I'm arguing that "federation" is the wrong word for Fediverse and Mastodon. I know it might technically be the right one, but words have multiple meanings, and federation is especially problematic. When people think about the word "federation" they think about things that keep it together. Common laws and regulations, and bureaucratic application to join one.
The United States is a federation, and this is where the confusion begins. If some state wanted to join it without an agreement of existing members, it would be laughed out of course. Similarly, if some state wanted to "de-federate" or kick out a member it would be virtually impossible without the agreement of other states.
Now let's compare this to Fediverse or Mastodon:
Firstly there is no process to join it, new members, you are in luck! Everyone is automatically in. There are no negotiations for new members [1]. ActivityPub, which is the underlying technology underneath Mastodon, is just an open web standard that tells how servers talk to each other. As an example, if you are running a WordPress blog you just install an ActivityPub plugin and people can start following your blog from any Mastodon instance.
There are no rules either, the only thing you need to be aware that other instances can individually choose to block or "de-federate" your blog. It's not as scary as it sounds, since there is no "federation" in a sense. The only thing de-federation means is that a specific server chooses to block another server. It doesn't affect other servers in the Fediverse at all.
If I wanted to explain Mastodon or Fediverse to regular people, I would not use "Federation", but "email". Most have a pretty good grasp of email. If Gmail.com decided it doesn't want to have any messages from Yahoo.com, it could do that, but it would not affect other servers at all.
Footnotes
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One could argue that this might change. Currently, all servers have just blacklists but not whitelists. It would be the end of the open web if servers started to keep whitelists, and required new members for certain agreements, to get into the whitelist. ↩