Now that Musk is running Twitter, people are looking for alternatives. Unfortunately federated (decentralized) networks like Mastodon seem unlikely to be the answer. This thread illustrates some of the basic problems: cost, collective action problems, fragmentation. Also…
https://twitter.com/atomicthumbs/status/1518668291660652544
…some of these issues with Mastodon—like hobbyist admins spying on you, username collisions, account discovery/portability—can probably be addressed with tech. But some, like reaching consensus on moderation so as to prevent network from constant splitting, are more fundamental.
We used to have decentralized, federated social media like the Usenet already decades ago. But as Internet usage exploded, they succumbed to spam, scams, and toxicity, and/or splintered into tiny communities that are manageable but don’t talk to each other…
Centralized platforms arose from the chaos of the 1990s Internet for similar reasons as centralized government arose historically. They’re good at maintaining order at scale. But they also give rise to the same fundamental problem…
Authorities protect us, but who will protect us from the authorities? This is true for new authorities like Chairman Musk of Twitter now as it was for government authorities before. More on this in #CloudEmpires cloudempires.org
Email is a very old federated network that survives by becoming increasingly centralized. Google (green) and Microsoft (pink) handle email for almost half of domains, and my guess is for more than half of email volume. 
https://twitter.com/phipz/status/1585934986813005824
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