This is a (unintentional, perhaps) statement of FUD based on your perception, and not based on reality.
I came across a pretty good quote the other day in relation to the ActivityPub space which struck a chord: "A resource arrangement that works in practice can work in theory" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elinor_Ostrom#Ostrom's_law
Show me a federated network that people are actually using in reality.
(these all have their builders as active users AFAIK)
Let me add another one or two. How about SMTP and BGP?
Federation in SMTP was necessary given the Internet's topology when email was invented. That network is long gone.
See TMTP, from the mnm open source project, which implements both the client & server:
Either of those outcomes would result in a poorer world.
The fact that facebook, telegram, whatsapp, etc are all centralized doesn't seem to stop criminals using those platforms.
I agree with your point but has this not happened with Gmail, Microsoft and Yahoo! for email anyway?
And it’s certainly a much better situation than other chat systems, where your identity is fundamentally tied to your account on that particular service. You can’t move to signal without moving everyone else to signal at the same time. I only need one email provider and one email app. But for messaging, everyone ends up needing signal, and WhatsApp, and Facebook to talk to each other. Imagine if you needed half a dozen email apps and accounts for each one to use email. “Oh, you’re emailing a company who uses Microsoft? Better open the Microsoft email program and remember your Microsoft login”.
No thanks!
A handful of webmail providers have centralized a large fraction of all email users. They already have the control you're concerned about.
Non-federated email means you have accounts at several sites, and most sites have membership requirements (customers-only, employees-only, etc). A client app keeps track of all your accounts. A webmail intermediary is unnecessary. The mnm demo gives a sketch of this [1] and the FAQ gives more detail [2].
I see any value in TMTP in the improvements as a protocol and I think it will be only be hurt by having no provision for federation in the protocol.
I'm not aware of any use cases for store-and-forward federation that aren't better served by a client-server network. And I've been thinking about this around the clock for four years :-)
Federation in email is used constantly and ubiquitously. Why would anyone want to turn it off?
SMTP has means to identify servers and domain ownership, web browsers have infrastructure to identify and verify arbitrary websites, and S/MIME exists. Most MUAs ignore basically all of this and instead trust whatever address is in a message's From header.
That is why I think we are still in early days of the (fediverse-powered) web. All this fringe tech will blossom eventually and we can live the 'decentralists dream' we all seem to be pushing for. Give it time. Yes, effort is still needed, and we all need to do our part to make it work, but simply being patient too, waiting for all this tech to bloom will be worth it.
(That included everything from I clicked the button until I had uninstalled McAfee and every other useless thing but still.)
Mastodon is by far the most popular app. A lot of that is by better productization and name recognition, leading to network effects. Downside to that for the Fediverse is that many newcomers think Mastodon === Fediverse, and don't discover all it has to offer.
For devs willing to contribute, or start their own federated projects, there's much to choose from and build upon. There is much untapped potential in the under-used Linked Data aspects of the specification. To build entirely different app types and protocols that interoperate (which need not necessarily be with entire fediverse). ForgeFed is an example of this.