It will be federated, but not with activitypub. It looks like they’re developing a more comprehensive system for federation

Spotify doesn’t make changes like that on its own, the artist probably did that for a reason

This sounds like an extremely annoying way to do things on mobile

I thought this was already decided, lol

critical mass

Ansible runs on your local machine, but it executes the setup on your (Linux) server remotely via SSH. I’d definitely recommend the Ansible setup, it was the easiest I tried. Are you able to SSH into your server already?