Moxie Marlinspike's counter-argument about the perils of federation: https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-m

Moxie Marlinspike's counter-argument about the perils of federation: https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ "On some level, federation is appealing precisely because it does freeze protocols in time. It’s great when centralized clients and servers roll out features that benefit us, but they could just as easily roll out features that don’t. Federation gives us more collective control over what changes we accept, but that comes with an unacceptable inability to adapt. Given that federated services always seem to coalesce around a provider that the bulk of people use, federation becomes a sort of implicit threat. Nobody really wants to run their own servers, but they know that it might be possible if their current host does something egregious enough to make it worth the effort. However, over the past six years, we’ve also seen the user cost of switching between centralized communication services reduced substantially, particularly given the tendency towards addressing with user-owned identifiers like phone numbers. The device’s address book is now the social network, so using phone numbers as an identifier has reduced switching costs by putting a user’s social network under their control. In a way, the notification center on a mobile device has become the federation point for all communication apps, similar to how older desktop IM clients unified communication across multiple IM networks. The effect has been visible in the messaging space, where market leaders have come and gone, new popular apps come out of nowhere, and even the most successful players seem compelled to continue iterating and improving their services as quickly as possible. This reduced user friction has begun to extend the implicit threat that used to come with federated services into centralized services as well. Where as before you could switch hosts, or even decide to run your own server, now users are simply switching entire networks. In many cases that cost is now much lower than the federated switching cost of changing your email address to use a different email provider. An open source infrastructure for a centralized network now provides almost the same level of control as federated protocols, without giving up the ability to adapt. If a centralized provider with an open source infrastructure ever makes horrible changes, those that disagree have the software they need to run their own alternative instead. It may not be as beautiful as federation, but at this point it seems that it will have to do."