Authors of both articles (OP's and the one it's responding to) seem to have the answer, put it in their mouths, turn it around with their tongues, and spit it back out, not recognizing it as the obvious way forward: self-hosting was how the internet started. It was the good old days. Now that we are all dancing puppets in the attention attrition economy, the answer is still the same: independence through concrete means. This means being able to tell some service provider to fuck off all the way to the top of Fuck Off Mountain, to swap out A for B, to connect to X, Y and Z, etc. On my own website, I can say whatever I want, and there's absolutely fuck-all you can do about it. You don't like it? You can leave.

Sure, the walled gardens of social media have conditioned new generations to twitch in unison, crave likes and spill rage via comments -- but is that something we want to sustain? I'd deprive that of oxygen and watch it wither. Give me ACTUAL connections, with the people I care about. The shimmering flickering scrolling dopamine drip gets in the way of real connection.

I think the idea of some kind of a distributed, persistent identity is a terrible spectre. Given how much power the incumbents have, if any kind of distributed identity authority actually took root, they would either clone their own and smother the original, or adopt it outright -- with the terrifying consequences of now being able to control your online presence everywhere, and tied to your actual offline identity. This would mean they could exact suffering on you everywhere (not just online) for whatever actions of yours they deem to be transgressions in their own little worlds.

No, the future IS self-hosted. Whether the "self" is an individual, a group, a community -- the answer is in a robust network of independent nodes, that actively choose how and whom they cooperate / interoperate with.