Empowerment before decentralisation

I was rather impressed by Moxie’s recent post on web3 and decentralisation (or lack thereof). It seems to have a struck a chord and is being circulated widely. Not surprising from the founder of Signal, a messaging app that has gathered criticism for being a centralised platform rather than a federated one (such as email).

There’s actually a bunch of open source energy going into developing a federated alternative: Matrix. The post ring true though: if I wanted to use Matrix as an end-user, the first thing I’d to is sign up to Element, the most popular platform in the ecosystem.

I think a more useful concept than decentralisation is empowerment. Moxie doesn’t use this term explicitly, but that’s what he’s describing in his conclusion, and I really do agree.