I think the point they’re making is you can effectively have a self hosted non federated option with Matrix. Just disable federation as a whole (which I’m pretty sure is completely possible. Given companies use matrix for comms, and might not want federation, for similar reasons to what is being discussed here)

Quick question, what would federation provide? How would they have anything to do with a search engine?

Do you mean just not centralized/run by big tech? If so, that wouldn’t necessarily be “federated”, but just self hostable. That way you can host it yourself, if you have the know how/equipment, or you can access someone else’s hosted version (probably for a price).

While I’m all for having local services like search engines. I don’t think we need more “messaging platform” services. At least not new complete platforms. I’d argue something like a Canadian popularized Matrix host or something.

Full disclosure, I’m American but fully support not depending on us. We fucking suck.