* Cryptocurrencies who's sole reason to exist is to justify its own existence. "We need token X to perform operation Y. Operation Y is important to facilitate the trade of token X". Seriously, how many tokens exist for the only purpose of being "gas" for its own network?
* Social networks that only discuss itself and its own existence.
* Programming languages where the largest project written in that language is its own compiler.
Solutions in search of a problem, is what they are.
I'd argue that social networks are a little bit different because discussing is what they do. Reddit is obsessed with itself, when I'd say most of the wide world doesn't care about the API or 3rd party app business (though they eventually may if moderation gets bad). Even 15 years ago a good amount of posting on reddit was about itself: secret Santas, seeing reddit bumper stickers, self referential memes, killing digg, how it was going mainstream, etc. It's a pretty natural progression of any project. That isn't to say federation will be successful, just that its self obsession is pretty normal.
Federation is already successful, since email is federated (you can register on gmail.com and send an email to an account at yahoo.com, or even run your own email server, although the ecosystem has evolved/commercialized to make that more difficult than it strictly has to be).
But Lemmy, we'll see. Maybe a better-written competitor emerges, or maybe they get their act together, or maybe the world doesn't want a federated Reddit clone (although my personal bet is that it does and subreddits are sort of the centralized prototype of that). But there's no question that federation itself is useful in certain applications.
True, though I'd say that email is a cautionary tale due to how centralized it's gotten. I guess I was referring to "second wave" federation, for lack of a better term. Federated replacements for social networks: Mastodon, Lemmy, Friendica, etc. I can't say if those will be as successful as email, just that an obsession with itself is a pretty normal part of the growth process. Part of what made reddit successful, especially early on, was people identifying themselves as reddit users.
> Running your own instance seems to be the only way to avoid this
Apart from languages which never bother self hosting, this seems backwards. It could be considered a sign of failure of a language if it never attracts projects beyond its own compiler, but it isn't true that a project which has its own compiler as the largest project is doomed to failure. For example, this was once true of Rust and Go but no longer is.
* Cryptocurrencies who's sole reason to exist is to justify its own existence. "We need token X to perform operation Y. Operation Y is important to facilitate the trade of token X". Seriously, how many tokens exist for the only purpose of being "gas" for its own network?
* Social networks that only discuss itself and its own existence.
* Programming languages where the largest project written in that language is its own compiler.
Solutions in search of a problem, is what they are.