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A lot of people worry that commercial networks joining the fediverse will inevitably take over the network, "like Gmail took over email."

Except, y'know, Gmail hasn't taken over email.

There are 4.5B active email users (Radicati), 1.5B Gmail users (CNBC). About 1/3.

Maybe all the people you know use Gmail.

Maybe that says more about the people you know than about the state of the email network.

Email remains robust, decentralized and diverse in 2023.

This entry was edited (3 years ago)

reshared this

in reply to Evan Prodromou

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mav

how would you respond to this? cfenollosa.com/blog/after-self…

After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel. The oligopoly has won.

Many companies have been trying to disrupt email by making it proprietary. So far, they have failed. Email keeps being an open protocol. Hurray? No hurray. Email is not distributed anymore. You just cannot create another first-class node of this ne
cfenollosa.com
in reply to Evan Prodromou

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DrJekyll

@mav I have a couple of domains, and it doesn't have to be hard.

I use a 3rd party to host the email for the domains and my name registrar has clear steps on now to setup the security / antispam features required.

Probably took a couple of hours to setup (most of the time waiting for things to propagate).

But yes, running hardware yourself is more involved of course, I'm just wanting to point out that there is a 'middle ground' 😀

@mav
in reply to Evan Prodromou

akkoma - Link to source

Dan Shick

sample size is much larger than one. this article has made many rounds through my networks; each time all the old heads like me pour one out for the days when one could run one’s own server.

the reason is spam, and the response of the dominant email providers to that spam. i believe if we had fewer monolithic email providers, we’d have better email client and server software that could handle that spam. as it stands, the few big sites call all the shots.

in reply to Evan Prodromou

akkoma - Link to source

Dan Shick

I don’t have $2500 lying around for access to the Radicati report. i’d say the meat of the argument is somewhere between your two extremes, but closer to “Gmail took over email”.

how about “don’t you think giant for-profit companies will continue to screw over the open internet, specifically the fediverse?” but perhaps you’ve already answered that to your own satisfaction. sorry to bother!

in reply to Dan Shick

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Evan Prodromou

the previous years' versions are available free of charge.

I think that people who say that Network X is going to ruin the fediverse are the same people who say that the fediverse will never be viable until it includes Network X.

You can think of a million reasons why the fediverse is going to fail, or why every good thing that happens is actually bad.

Or you can build the network and make social software more free.

This entry was edited (3 years ago)
in reply to Evan Prodromou

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Charles Roper

Email products I use:

1. Outlook.com
2. Microsoft 365 (work email)
3. Around 10 email forwarders associated with personal domains and products
4. Several IMAP/SMTP accounts on cPanel domains w/Roundcube web client
5. A couple of Tutanota accounts
6. A Protonmail account
7. Paid up Firefox Relay customer
8. DuckDuckGo Email Protection relay user
9. Mailbird email client on desktop
10. Several GMail accounts

Email is beautiful in its diverse, multi-faceted glory.

cc @chriscoyier

@Chris Coyier
in reply to Evan Prodromou

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Jim Parsons

My “here's to the crazy ones" thesis:

• any #Fediverse self-hosted instance as easy to set up as a Facebook account

• #Fediverse must easily straddle;

- PRIVATE
consumer individual family safe spaces
#privacy #encryption

– OPENWEB
shared public resource, common carrier status,
actual virtual-public-square not #Elmo absolutist illusion w/corp asses covered by #Section230

• SysAdmin a pain = opportunity

• market for #Privacy enabled

• new Laws needed, incumbents will resist

#fediverse #Privacy #section230 #elmo #encryption
in reply to Guillaume Ross

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Evan Prodromou

@g right. Let's try this:

A, B and C are people with email addresses.

B has Gmail, A and C do not.

There are nine possible email messages: A to B, A to C, B to A, B to C, C to A, C to B, A to B and C, B to A and C, C to A and B.

Only 2/9 or about 22% don't go through Gmail.

"I see a lot of stuff come through Gmail" is reasonable, but it doesn't mean everybody uses Gmail.

@Guillaume Ross
in reply to Evan Prodromou

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Guillaume Ross

To get the real numbers I guess I could dump a few years of email and parse MX records for domains, but it's safe to say a large portion of it does as your scenario shows.

I think it's not that big of a problem as I never felt like I *had* to have a gmail email account, but I do feel like self-hosting has gotten much worse in the last decade or two due to hard to use software, aggressive spam filtering on the big providers that are biased against small ones etc.

in reply to Jons Mostovojs

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Jons Mostovojs

finally, when we compare Facebook's move with ActivityPub to Google, we seldom compare it to E-mail. We compare it to XMPP, which got extinguished by Google Talk defederation.

Even more finally: analogy is not an argument. While arguing with people who use analogy as an argument, it's more sound to point that out rather than finding a counter-analogy which may or may not be analogous enough. 🙂

in reply to Evan Prodromou

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Michael Roberts

Gmail is still a big enough gorilla it doesn't have to follow rules, though. When it classified *my* server as spam, it sent no diagnostic messages. Just stopped accepting mail, inconveniencing nobody except the people I try to email. And me.

Meta will do the same for the fediverse. Embrace, extend, and attempt to extinguish, because even a tiny additional shard of market share is worth any amount of irritation for others, if it doesn't cost me anything.

in reply to Evan Prodromou

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Pēteris Krišjānis

I view it simple like that - can I move my mailbox away from GMail?
I can. I might not want to, it wouldn't be worth my time. But still - I can roll out my own server, and there are literately hundreds of very good mail services. And while running email server has been challenging last 15 years, core is still the same.
So yes, actual federation matters and being afraid someone swooping in is pointless at the moment.
in reply to Evan Prodromou

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Filipe

I believe the problem is not just that email is run on Gmail servers, but that Gmail takes up enough accounts that if you want to be a server communicating with all accounts, you have to play by their rules. Even if you don't host on Gmail, you will follow their commands. I think.

Either way, I believe the right "conspiracy theory" would be to accuse Gmail, Microsoft and Yahoo of oligopoly, and not just Gmail of monopoly.

in reply to Evan Prodromou

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Chris

@i_dabble given how networks work, I'd be curious to see how much email communication (sans spam) happens outside google's (or the big 5's) purview.

My gut feeling is that as most businesses rely on either gmail or some Microsoft thing, most communication invariably touches their servers.

This puts them in the powerful position to set the rules you either play by or are excluded.

This is not about blame, but to caution: I expect similar spam patterns to email to emerge with activitypub.

in reply to Evan Prodromou

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mr_daemon

And yet because big email hosts (microsoft hosted exchange/360, gmail, hotmail, etc) are the overwhelming majority of platforms providing the service, this has had a negative impact on the rest of the internet.

If I may expand this thought: I'm a SRE/systems administrator by trade and I have setup my fair share of MTA/MDA stacks -- all you needed back then to run email was a static ip, a matching reverse DNS name, MX records and someone who knows what they are doing to some degree. 1/2

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