use cryptography, for decentralized identities and content addressability.
the "fediverse" is ostensibly decentralized but that actually just means it has more single points of failure than the centralized model it is attempting to replace. (a failure doesn't necessarily take the whole thing down, but, "federated" generally means there are more people and systems which could individually prevent information from flowing from point A to B; eg, I can't message someone on another server if my server is down or if their server is down.)
Secure Scuttlebutt has a much better data model but is doing other things wrong so I haven't used it much. Maybe Twitter's Bluesky thing will produce something good, but I'm not holding my breath. What is clear is that ActivityPub is not a good long-term answer (but it is fun today).