I think the Fediverse is showing us a new future, but we're not there yet.
What I'm thinking of is each person has their own, personal, 'instance' online. It uses ActivityPub (or what replaces it) to connect to others. You can post a thought (microblog), or longer thoughts (blog), a photo (pixelfed), a video (peertube), a sound clip (??? - suggestions for Soundcloud-like Federation), etc., all on your own instance.
All controlled by you with others linking to your instance and/or your posts. Hubs like Lemmy, Mastodon, Pixelfed, etc., can all have User Profiles that you setup that aggregate your data to their hub. Lemmy would be setup to pull in any links you share on your blog, with comments to that share being microblogs/blogs that interacted with your post. Your Mastodon profile would pull in those microblogs with links back to the source/origin. Pixelfed would pull in any pictures in the links, plus any posted by user replies.
Every post would have associated "Traits" to define what type of media it contains. Posts would also have hashtags as a more granular and customizable way of defining media. AI makes these things semi-automated.
You could block traits, hashtags, hubs, instances, etc. to tailor exactly what type of experience you want to have. You could also block data scrappers, etc., from your instance if we can't get government to protect them by law for us.
So this is where I hope we're heading with a federated network of users.