Yeah, we've literally seen this forum migration happen many times in the short history of the internet. Reddit had some novel concepts in terms of evolving and democratizing the concept, and it was the best thing since sliced bread for a long time.

Federation is a reasonable evolution of the user-run, user-generated concept, which ultimately requires more freedom that a heavily monetized platform can ever deliver. I there will always be a distinction between internet media as a product, and internet media as a utility. The neat thing seems to be that the internet kind of always seems to evolve new versions of the latter when they are needed.