> 5 years are not a long time to update the entirety of the internet Given that WhatsApp manages to update its entirety of the internet in a few days, I'd say

> 5 years are not a long time to update the entirety of the internet Given that WhatsApp manages to update its entirety of the internet in a few days, I'd say that is quite a long time. Is there a name for this fallacious "arguing for/against something without comparing it to alternatives"? > But the answer to this problem would logically be that we need to increase our efforts to change that by reducing the number of GMail accounts and increasing the number of self-hosted email servers, right? No, the argument is that decentralized services will mostly be centralized anyway due to the fact that centralization can move faster. Everyone has Gmail on the other end because Gmail is better than other services (that is the argument, not what I personally believe, as I think Fastmail is better). Given that decentralization will lead to the existence of a few large points of centralization anyway, we should make those points secure, and centralizing allows us to do that better, the argument goes. > While this is an issue, there are solutions to this problem, one being nomadic identities. The point is that nobody has zero-knowledge nomadic identities. AFAIK Signal were the first ones to come up with a practical implementation a few days ago. > For some reason Marlinspike confuses a decentralized system with a centralized, but distributed system. It even reads “Centralized Service” on his slides… Moxie is talking about a centralized service. It says centralized on the slides, he said centralized twice, the author seems confused here. > These suites act as maps that point a way through the XEP jungle. Yes, and a centralized service needs none of this. Personally, I don't see this article debunking many of the points. Decentralized is better for censorship-resistance, and I prefer it, but it's better for that because centralized platforms aren't usually designed for censorship resistance. Signal knows nothing about its messages, and thus it's much harder to censor people using it. I feel like Moxie made some good arguments, and would like to see some solutions in making decentralized servers and clients more easily upgradable. Signal's approach works for signal, but it also works for almost every other person, since everyone seems happy to use Facebook or Slack or whatnot instead of Riot for their communications. I really like what Mastodon is doing in the federated microblogging space, and hopefully that will extend to other areas.