The point of the article is not that defederation should be used as a management tool, but that it can be very effective in protecting the fediverse from becoming a monopoly play among big corps only.

See, you said it yourself, "don’t see tier 1 ISPs de-peering each other", "don’t see major providers blackholing major providers", "major players don’t de-peer other major players", you talk about big players only not blocking each other, but that misses the point of small players being blocked out by the big ones.

quote from the article:

Blocklists for email exist and are shared across services – and blocking is often pre-emptive, not based on suspicious behaviour of that server. Sure, email is an open set of protocols, but it’s also highly restricted by large companies and not at all open to either smaller providers or individuals.

This isn’t just an abstract issue: I know of friends who have had to abandon email servers they ran themselves, sometime literally on a box in the corner of a home office, because the big corporations that dominate email simply wouldn’t deliver anything they send.

That's the risk, corporations are not stupid, they see the potential in the fediverse right now but they have the nasty habit of "embracing, extending - not always extinguishing but making it almost impossible for new competitors to enter the market".

They could totally ruin the fediverse if left unchecked.

@PriorProject @PorkrollPosadist

All the examples you provided were infrastructure, not social communities, so I think it's a poor comparison.

Instead, I'd compare AP federation to _social_ constructs. Communities, clubs, groups of friends. Even larger constructs like cities or nation states.

In _those_ examples it's clear that limiting association is commonplace and healthy.

The internet is federated, but you don’t see tier 1 ISPs de-peering each other over arguments on social media.

No, but they intentionally cripple peering to blackmail others into paying extra or move their data-centers into the network of these bad-actor ISPs. Happens all the time sadly.

Email (which IS a great analogy… exactly because of the precedent for combatting abuse at scale) is federated, and you don’t see major providers blackholing major providers.

Keyword "major". Everyone else is pretty much defederated these days, which is the point the article was trying to make.

Telephone networks and the banking system are both federated, and generally major players don’t de-peer other major players within established ecosystems.

Read up on history. You have this completely backwards. It took many years of government intervention to force them to open their networks. And in some countries banks still don't interoperate or charge obscene rates for it.