> highlights the risks associated with the centralization of instant messaging services

That seems to be the takeaway.

Centralization of just about anything is an issue, not just messaging.

However, users still want/need the kinds of advantages that we get from monopolies/centralization, and implementing them in distributed systems is really hard.

I wonder if there was ever a path for solving this early, like, we made email and that proliferated, if only we'd landed on better identity management first, would we be in some digital messaging utopia.

Would the world be better if we'd been saying "whats your public key?" instead of "whats your email?" in the 90s?