yeah it depends on the overall goal really. Scuttlebutt has done some interesting things with a non-federated and offline-first approach to decentralized comms scuttlebutt.nz
maybe I misinterpreted the specific problems with the fediverse that you're referring to then.
I'm trying to find a good reference, this one talks about some of the problems, which Mastodon has for the same reasons: natdudley.com/blog/twitter-u…
the original mention of indieweb was sufficiently vague that I don't blame you for conflating it with mastodon, but there's a lot more to draw inspiration from than just what mastodon did. for example, i'm not even writing this on twitter, i'm writing it on my own website.
I remember some of the features not working great, especially connecting it to a phone, but I had mine set up to auto-upload my photos to Flickr when I got on my home wifi, and it worked flawlessly for that!