I think the idea of 'work' is not in a technical sense but in a business and social sense: does it see success at a large scale? As things get larger, they get harder to judge, so asking that about Linux and all airplanes and open source ISAs is kind of irrelevantly difficult, whereas it's pretty easy to talk about Matrix 'not working': I don't use it, my school doesn't use it, etc. It hasn't seen widespread adoption and success. To restate the OP with this definition, decentralized applications that do 'work' (see widespread success) are all 'owned' by some unknowably large corporation (Google for email, GitHub for Git, etc) in a way that emulates centralized applications (the restriction of traditional decentralized freedoms talked about in the article). Out of this, the post makes the point that if we see decentralized systems as 'good', then we have to face this as a failure of the 'free market' and try to think of or move to something better.

I think the author's underlying point is that all of the decentralised applications she's talking about rely on their having a large number of users communicating with one another in order to do what they're supposed to do, and that decentralised systems often perform poorly in terms of getting enough users for them to achieve that goal.

Imagine you came up with a technically superior version of email, and it functioned technically perfectly, but you were unable to convince anyone else to use it. Sure, it would "work" technically in a narrow functional sense, but it wouldn't "work" in terms of doing what it was actually designed to do. My taking LSD isn't really affected by other people doing so or not: it's a private thing. But my sending an email is: it's a network interaction.

The author's claim is correct in the sense that, if you hold a party and no-one comes, the party didn't really work.

Each of those perspectives is in fact taken by many people. From the government's perspective, if something is used for illegal purposes, that's a severe defect and the thing isn't working. From Greenpeace's perspective, cars do not work.

None of that is relevant to the people who use drug marketplaces or cars, but those are different people.

I agree with your sentiment. The style you chose to express it makes it hard to read. It seems unnecessarily defensive, sort of like someone poking me in the chest to make a point about something that I don’t feel emotional about.

This defensive tone is one of the few ways I have found to make myself understood clearly without overthinking my prose.

When I write in more "narrative" tone, it's hard for me to make sure that my grammar is right, and that I'm making myself understood.

In fact, I always try to write my comments in narrative form first, but many times the grammar comes out awkward, so I scrap that and write in a more dialogical form.

If you have any recommendations on how to improve this, they're welcome.