The article talks mostly about e-mail and search, but you know what's still the best social network on the interwebs? E-mail. When I dumped social media two years ago, I gave my "friends" my e-mail address. Now, instead of getting an endless stream of reposted political image captions and photos of people's lunches I get messages about the things that are actually worth seeing: news about family, friends, life events…
Federated social media could be the solution.