It should be trivially verifiable by yourself: just watch what requests your device is making. And the app itself is open source, so you should be able to trust it.

Yes, this is what the article says. This means we must force them to.

Even if 90% of users use the centralized service, the protocol being open gives enormous value to the remaining 10%. And as long as the 10% keep the protocol open, the _possibility_ of decentralization can keep the centralized services honest.

We only need to keep the googles of the world from completely shutting down the open protocols. I mean, even that can get hard, but it's still entirely reasonable goall.

[0]: https://wiki.gnupg.org/WKD

The Mastodon culture is also fairly opposed to large instances. Mastodon.social (the "flagship") is widely criticised for allowing itself to grow much larger than other instances. The community prefers small, homely intantances, median size is probably about 500 users, like this one. This may seem weird to outsiders, but instances like this one are one of the main draws of Mastodon.

There have been other similar cases.

I recently also found a Firefox extension [1] I'd been looking for a some time: a way to automatically enter reader mode on some URLs, such as medium.com. This makes browsing Medium much nicer.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/automatic-rea...

There is no centralized authority, which means that the protocol in decentralized. It's just not decentralized in exactly the same way as something like Bitcoin. Some might call that a good thing.

But isn't this fixable? What about a service with a twitter-like UX, but where following people just subscribes to their announced rss-feeds. User profiles would be, at least under the hood, a list of user's own blogs (and the service would also provide twitter-like publishing) and followed rss feeds. You'd have the advantage of supporting most pre-existing blogs, but could also provide a great user friendly experience.