Fair enough, thanks for sharing your thoughts.

Yeah, that Moxie post is pretty infamous, and I have a lot of thoughts on it (won't write them all because it'd take too long). Mainly though I think he makes a very good point, and is more or less right.

The Matrix devs talk about this a lot, and is why for example they have Matrix Spec Proposals. Those are meant to work around the critique (they can be very informal, easy to submit, lots get merged). With the hype Matrix is getting these days, I think it could offer a federated way forward.

Even with that out the way, I think a lot of the reason centralized services do so well is because it's just easier to use them. If a non-technical user tries XMPP and Matrix, they're going to be confused ("why do I need to sign up to an instance, and which do I choose?"). Compared to Signal, you just give it your number and you're done, it's so much easier. This aspect of federated vs non-federated is not solved (Matrix's "solution" is to have a de-facto primary instance, matrix.org, but that undermines a lot of its federated claims). I think advances in UI/UX will eventually lead to this being less of an issue.