> I have yet to see a federated system that solves these problems, and the fact that no federated system is as popular as the centralized systems lead me to bel

> I have yet to see a federated system that solves these problems, and the fact that no federated system is as popular as the centralized systems lead me to believe it might be an unsolvable problem. A dominant siloed service is precisely what stops a federated network from emerging. This is why I'm very pleased that Microsoft has bought GitHub, because it's apparently jolted a lot of people into realising that GitHub is a single dominant provider. I think GitHub became dominant the same way Twitter and Gmail did. Techy early adopters ignored the fact that it was proprietary, because it was a nice service among many options; but this growth and the network effect led to an effective monopoly: 1. Neat tech demo, siloed but harmlessly tiny 2. Techy early adopters start to rely on it because it's genuinely useful 3. Network effect brings in the masses 4. Scalability problems: interoperability is still desired, but less urgent than fail whales 5. Investors invest; money pays for scaling up and fixing fail whales 6. Investors get itchy at loss-making, want a return on their investment Now you have the masses using your service, and any competitors are ghost towns. Investors want money and your most valuable asset is your user base. Interoperability would make it easier to lose your users, so lock-in becomes essential to your business strategy. If enough people jump into the silo before federation works, federation will never be added. Avoid supporting proprietary networks.