I really wish the way federation worked was that the federated stuff had its own like federated area. So instead of posting on some random comm on some other instance, there were federated comms that exist in all federated instances.

That we have to have a "please only hexbears!" post that has to be manually enforced by mods is a failure of the federation model.

In conclusion, FIDONet was the peak of federation and nothing since has come close.