> [federation] offers a degree of censorship resistance, as the messages or images are replicated across multiple servers, making it difficult for any single entity to censor or control the content.

That's the way Matrix goes, but that's not an inherent property of federation (XMPP doesn't leak nearly as much metadata as Matrix does, for instance)

Also, there is no free lunch in this space: p2p is slow and inefficient (bandwidth as much as battery) for modern mobile usecases, the workarounds generally consist of having edge servers to act as caches or preferred routing points, and that brings us back to the exact same set of tradeoffs found in the federation model, except with less control.

In short, I agree with the premise that Matrix is terrible, but not that federation is necessarily bad, nor that P2P is clearly superior.