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She seems to assume that federations are supposed to be small groups where everyone knows each other. Has anyone claimed that?

Email and the web are the perfect examplea of federations, because they are not controlled by a single company; they are interoperable. From Gmail I can send an email to a friend who uses Outlook. That way I'm not forced to use outlook if I want to communicate with him and I can use any email provider I want. The fact that Google and Microsoft are trillion dollar companies is irrelevant here.

Same with the web, I can change my ISP and keep accessing the exact same webpages as before because the web is federated, and not controlled by my ISP. The fact that I use it to visit pages controlled by other large companies is irrelevant.

Facebook or Whatsapp, on the other hand, are not federated. If I want to communicate with my friends who use Facebook or Whatsapp I have no other choice than to use Facebook and Whatsapp.