<i>Part of what I&#x27;ve been noticing is that we have these &quot;walled gardens&quot; today that people consider to be synonymous with &quot;lock in,&quot; but it&#x27;s actually easier for people to move from Viber to WhatsApp to Telegram to Signal today than it is for people to move from gmail to yahoo mail.</i><p>I wonder how much of this is specific to messaging services, though:<p>After all, messagers are both real-time and strongly biased towards current information. This means it&#x27;s both very easy no notify people of a new account and relatively painless to close down an old one - you rarely have valuable archieved Whatsapp messages that you can&#x27;t afford to lose.<p>Finally, thanks to platform notification APIs, it&#x27;s very easy to run different messengers at once, so if your social network is split between different services, that&#x27;s usually not a problem.<p>I don&#x27;t see how those qualities are present in other services which have become more centralized - e.g. email, cloud storage, more persistent social networks or publishing. If I&#x27;d like to shut down my Facebook account and switch to some other hypothetical network, without losing all my contacts, that&#x27;s going to be a lot more difficult than switching messengers.<p>Also note that smartphone apps are pretty much &quot;walled gardens within a walled garden&quot; as of now: Yes, it&#x27;s easy to port my contacts from one android app to another android app or to run different messenger apps in parallel. But that&#x27;s because I&#x27;m actually just giving different apps permission to the same underlying APIs and database. Shutting down my Google account and migrating to a cempletely open alternative: not so easy.<p>I do agree with the post that centralized services de facto are more sucessful than federation in the current ecosystem. But I&#x27;d argue that centralized services still have a lot of disadvantages for their users. So maybe we should start analyzing why this is the case instead of just shrugging and saying this is how the works works.