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Open-minded or not, people want to communicate to other people, like their friends. So they join networks which their friends have joined. This naturally results in a single, winner-takes-all network. That network can be federated, of course! Look how interoperable email or phone networks are. Too bad they are mostly a few behemoths that have to interoperate because they cannot eat each other, for market and legal reasons. A federated network is going to always be less feature-rich, slower, and more hassle to deal with; Moxie Marlinspike wrote a good text about that. So, unless users make a constant, conscious effort to stay on a federated network, outside the luring walled gardens, the walled gardens win. And most people don't even think about all the privacy implications and stuff, they just want to share cat photos with friends. |
You are missing a major issue here: spam. E-mail and phone calls are riddled with spam precisely because these are at least somewhat open systems.
E-mail is unusable without running it through a ton of spam filters or (more commonly) letting someone else with a larger data set do that for you.
Phone calls are in some ways even worse. I no longer answer unidentified calls, period, and I keep my phone on vibrate at all times. Any important calls must be scheduled. I get 2-4 robocalls per day. I'm tempted to change my number but I've heard it doesn't matter.
Spam is a huge reason walled gardens win. Anything open gets abused to death.
Another example is closed OSes like iOS. Consumers love iOS because you almost never see malware. Open OSes easily acquire malware if the user is not tech-savvy (and even sometimes if they are), and finding software outside a walled garden is an exercise in picking your way through a minefield. Have you tried to search for a Windows app on the open web recently?