The article makes a correct distinction between decentralization at a technical and social level that is direly needed. We ought to make a much stronger distinction between distributed computing and decentralized communities. It's more or less a quadrant. Torrent systems and Mastodon are both decentralized and distributed. Twitter is both technically and socially centralized. Reddit is technically centralized but socially federated, and contrary to popular intuition a lot of cryptocurrencies are centralized, global state machines on distributed hardware, not actually decentralized socially which would defeat their purpose for existing.

What people are after in social networks increasingly is local communities. Whether it runs on protocols or platforms doesn't really matter. I'd agree though with the authors and Moxie's take that protocols have a lot of problems due to their slowness and technical hurdles. In reality they also tend to coalesce into platforms anyway due to economic pressures.

The most appealing quadrant for social networks I think is the Reddit one. Some platform with a baseline and minimum of largely legal rules but local moderation. Which is essentially how real world federations work anyway. If it's a new or existing one I don't know but I could well imagine that Twitter or Facebook more and more devolve power towards regional communities and create better and fine-tuned moderation tools. Telegram and Discord are already examples of this as well.