All I can really say in response to this article is that I expect it to age poorly.
2021 is just a bad time to make confident pronouncements about decentralization. The vast majority of the population is living in Facebook/WhatsApp/Discord/Visa&Mastercard land, sure.
But I'm a heavy Matrix user, it works great. I torrent all the time: it works great. I'm also on urbit, and it works great. I don't use Mastodon personally but I hear few complaints from people who do. Podcasts are fine, other applications of RSS are pretty crippled by bad defaults of only including a little bit of the blog post, but Substack at least doesn't do it that way, which has me using an RSS reader again. It's nice!
The big elephant is the cybercoins, and it's just a weird time to declare them a failure. It's like no one remembers 2017, this has practically been a carbon copy, just with more institutional buy-in and bigger numbers.
No one knows if cryptocurrency is going to fulfill the promise of becoming a global store of value, let alone if it will be Bitcoin or Ethereum or some dark horse: but it pretty much has to go from worth nothing to worth everything, and the middle stages of that are going to be weird.
The one I'm really betting on is Matrix, though. They have reliable income from the French and German governments, and plenty of motive to make a really good platform. I fully expect them to be as slick and featureful as Slack and Discord within a couple of years, and start to eat those company's lunch.
"Redecentralization" is harder than the first phase of building a green-field decentralized Internet, because there are entrenched powers with a head start. But there are some compelling advantages to decentralized technology, with means, motive, and opportunity, to build them out.
Yeah. Don't think it will age well. Let's check back in around 2031 and see what actually happened.