There's a well-known African proverb: "If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together." What Moxie's centralization talk misses is that the faults in early decentralized protocols came because dotcoms wanted to capture the market.
The buildings full of devs he references all labored over the past two decades to reinvent the same messaging wheel, but w/ a network they owned. Libpurple plugins serve as a graveyard of proprietary chat protocols--failures to capture the market, wasted dev effort.
These companies went fast alone, but they didn't go far. The last 20 yrs show few real innovations in msging. How many attempts has Google made? If they all had worked together, you wouldn't have a half-dozen incompatible messaging apps with similar features on your phone.
Is it really better that FB has three incompatible msging apps they now have to wrangle into one new proprietary protocol? In the 20 year fight to own the market, all we have to show for it are mountains of abandoned proprietary code, dead networks, wasted efforts.
We still haven't learned the lesson. The next decade promises even more duplicated effort as each org reinvents proprietary e2e encryption protocols on private networks in the name of privacy, but with the effect of making compatibility almost impossible.
If your app wins this war, maybe you won't care, but history tells me tech giant dominance is temporary. All those devs writing proprietary msging apps today are writing tomorrow's abandoned code. We'd all go much farther if we went together. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
@kyle TED talk?