- Public matchmaking (aka centralization) sucks. Toxic users are loud and common, and the community has no tools to deal with them, which puts everyone at the mercy of the dev's minimal efforts. You don't feel like part of a community because you just get a randomized slice of the population shouting at you.
- Client hosting (pure decentralization) is like a ghost town and has performance issues. Actual distributed compute is rare... and a crypto pyramid scheme everywhere I have checked.
- High capacity dedicated hosting (aka federated hosting) is... nice. You get admins and mods who actually care about moderating their community and are small enough to handle it. When drama happens, server hop.
Hence to me, Mastadon is way more appealing than the p2p solutions.
Big Tech invading privacy was a response to reducing the Gap between Attention and Info (collecting likes, monitoring activity was required to produce a better news feed or search index). Decentralization, pki, moderation, safety etc dont really address the Gap. And quite probably lead to more info not less.
Its looking like if you build anything these days without thinking about whether you are reducing the Gap, you end up with strange unsolvable issues sooner or later.
My guess as to his motivation: he feels guilty about the fact he helped turn Twitter into a huge greedy company instead of an open world-changing protocol like HTTP or SMTP.
The problem is that he's fragmenting his efforts, it's like his effort capacity is 3 ants, and instead of telling all ants to pull the leaf in one direction, he tells each ant to pull in a different direction, so the leaf never moves.
Social networks are ALL about network effects. Split them up and they melt into obscurity. Combine them, they become untouchable.