it's like federation, but at the level of a user. Much easier to set up, much easier to curate / moderate what you want to see.
There's still emergent community in the space, it's just not tied to the politics of hardware
In addition in works offline (including images). Many of us catch up with friends and reply to their posts when on the train, plain, boat, road, whatever and sync up when we get to a net connection, or local connection to a local friend with SSB.
What do you mean by this? Is there some sort of hardware politics battle in the GNU social community or something?