If we have a federated messager that some people self host, would that actually be more secure? i dont know much about how federation works, but i imagine that an intelligence agency could make an instance that would federate to the others, listen to the metadata of the exchanges in the network and rebuild a social graph like a centralized server could. Is this a non-issue?

its a strategy, theyre not even being deceitful here, just pricing to their interests. theres so much evil stuff they do, but this example isn’t properly evil.