It&#x27;s precisely the fact that Moxie is so credible on this topic that makes his post so frustrating. I believe that he&#x27;s telling the truth as he sees it, and I believe that he&#x27;s as well-situated as anyone could be to pull off a white-hat secure messaging system, so if he says it can&#x27;t be done with federation, it&#x27;s awfully hard for me to assert that he&#x27;s wrong.<p>The problem is that I don&#x27;t see the point of doing any of this <i>without</i> federation. If we&#x27;re just using the Internet as a substrate for a bunch of proprietary silo services, then we&#x27;re just back to the way things were before - walled gardens and media conglomerates and extortionate Bell System-style lock-in shenanigans. So what? Why bother? What have we gained, with all this effort, if we&#x27;re back in the same old shit again?<p>The whole point was that we no longer needed to get anyone&#x27;s permission to communicate, to publish, to build new services for interacting with each other; we could just <i>do it</i>. If federation is gone, then those days are gone, and the most important reason to care about the Internet is gone, too.