I agree. Discord actually had a metaphor that I think plays well for federation. Specifically, they called each group a server. And organized the UI in a way that would make federation pretty transparent.

The only consufsing bit would be the concept of a home server login ID. Like, the lack of a central identity provider. But I think that isn’t a show stopper.

I kinda wish there were fed ID providers that all fed servers used for login and authentication. I’m not sure exactly how that would work, but being able to have a single identity across mastodon, Lemmy, and any other fed service would really simplify things once you were in the fediverse.