> He writes “don’t work” but he seems to mean “aren’t easy to monetize.”
> The protocols “work” just fine. It’s making money that seems to require centralization, even by his own examples.
Why would you say that? I skimmed it, and he wrote very little about money at all, and a lot about the stagnation that federated protocols experience, e.g.:
> I thought about it. We got to the first production version of IP, and have been trying for the past 20 years to switch to a second production version of IP with limited success. We got to HTTP version 1.1 in 1997, and have been stuck there until now. Likewise, SMTP, IRC, DNS, XMPP, are all similarly frozen in time circa the late 1990s. To answer his question, that’s how far the internet got. It got to the late 90s.
> That has taken us pretty far, but it’s undeniable that once you federate your protocol, it becomes very difficult to make changes. And right now, at the application level, things that stand still don’t fare very well in a world where the ecosystem is moving.
It's true: the federated protocol that is email doesn't actually have encryption, even though people have been talking about it for decades. The need to be interoperable with lowest common denominator means that even Phil Zimmerman finds it too troublesome to receive anything that's not unencrypted. A platform like WhatsApp added it in like a year or two.
Federation seems like it more for an end state where things are stable and well-understood enough that it's tolerable that the implementations stagnate.