Some benefits of federation for a system like this is possibility of integrated-into-one-system project comments, friends/subscriptions and user/project search/discovery (also by tags).

What I personally miss in every single one of recommendations in this thread is: they’re all timeline-based, without a good way to showcase and arrange content. When I want to showcase my projects (be it code or art), I’d want them to be structured in arbitrary ways on my profile that make most sense at the moment, and I’d want to be able to rearrange them at any moment. ArtStation gets this right, Github also to some extent - they have pinned projects on your profile that you can showcase and rearrange.

So Medium and Substack are similar? And Ghost is also an open-source alternative to Medium as much as it is alternative to Substack?

Never used Substack, can someone please explain how this is different from lets say Medium?

Nothing? In practice, if this were to happen on a noticeable scale it would mean Lemmy has gone mainstream. That said, within a federated system, it’s entirely possible to create isolated, defederated webrings - for example, networks consisting solely of invite-based instances. If something like this becomes a necessity, it might lead to formation of multiple such webrings and they might even decide to federate with each other someday.