The past few days' discussion of federated social networking have really brought out the... I don't know how to describe them, KPI-brained people? If you've worked in social networking UX for the past decade your entire professional experience & perception of norms have been geared toward funneling people into the optimal mould to which to sell advertisers the right to manipulate them. That's it! All the frictionless stuff isn't about making peoples' lives better, or "delighting" them, or whatever. It's to ensure as many people as possible are available as grist for the manipulation mill. Myopic, this makes the UX actually very bad. I don't need to rant about all the consent-disregarding stuff we've all seen ("Do you want to enable bad thing? Yes/Ask me later") but fundamentally I don't think we should care about the opinions of anyone applying their corporate UX reasoning skills against the idea of federation, appealing to some prescriptive sense of what people care about.