Doesn’t work in hilly cities. That’s why San Francisco has trolleybuses too (and the historical cable cars, but those are more for tourists). They do have light rail where it does make sense though.
I think the best middle ground might be where there’s a bunch of separate apps that all have their own default server, where they hide most of the fediverse complexity from the user. They’d still all be accessing the same content, but it would just be simpler for ‘normal’ users.
Oh no, there’s communists involved in my free global collaborative software project!