The value of the federated/decentralized nature of email is hard to overstate.

So many of the problems of modern technology are caused by centralization. It concentrates power and wealth into a handful of companies that now control the internet. It introduces extraordinary problems from managing data and services at global scales, which is the biggest technical challenge these companies face. It makes government surveillance easier (PRISM, etc.), and is a prime target of corruption by advertising, propaganda, etc. It robs people of control over their data.

All of these things are either non-issues, or far less of an issue, with decentralized technology invented half a century ago. It is bewildering that we had email, Usenet, DNS, and the internet itself, yet we ended up with strong centralization with the web, which is built on decentralized protocols.

I partly blame the early implementation of the WWW for this. I've written at length about this before[1][2], so I won't repeat it here.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43296810

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44327508

> federated/decentralized

I'd be really quite hesitant to blur these concepts so casually.