I'm glad to see someone push back a bit on Moxie's reasoning in that essay. For those who have not seen it: https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ ht

I'm glad to see someone push back a bit on Moxie's reasoning in that essay. For those who have not seen it: https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ I've thought he's wrong for a while. The problem is not that you can't innovate within the context of a (well designed) federated system. If that were true the Internet would still be using telnet, rlogin, finger, Gopher, and vanilla ftp. The problem with decentralized and federated systems, as I've repeated ad nauseum, is lack of an economic model. It's the same as the problem with any kind of consumer-oriented open source. IMHO every other explanation is mental contortions to avoid looking at the economic factor. The innovation isn't happening because producing high quality software with support for multiple platforms, diverse network environments, etc. is fabulously expensive yet we pretend it's something hobbyists (who don't have trust funds) can do in their spare time. Centralized systems can have their choice of viable economic models: commercial software rental (SaaS), non-profit fund raising, free core with paid upgrades, advertising, and of course less savory ones like surveillance and pay-to-play addictionware. You can try to raise money for clients/nodes to run in decentralized and federated systems, but since there's always more than one and very few people pay for anything unless compelled there's always going to be too little funding to make any of them great. For a little while I was optimistic that cryptocurrency and tokenization might provide a mechanism, but then scammers and gamblers destroyed that ecosystem.