@mike brings up a compelling argument for the #fediverse in a historical analogy with #aol: all the innovation around, say, travel in the closed AOL system back then could only come from AOL and whatever they could think up. It took the protocol-not-platform-centric decentralized web to catalyze the much broader innovation we’ve seen since, e.g. AirBnb is hard to imagine having been invented inside a closed system like AOL.