back when I was a grad student in distributed systems, there was this saying about one of the ancient gods of the field that "a distributed system is one in which you can't get work done because a server you've never heard of is down"
a lot of the science of distributed systems was meant to make them resilient, tolerant to failures
alas, federation pushers embraced the decentralization without any of the fault tolerance. so now we have networks that are never fully functional. yay us :-/