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.
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Craig Maloney β
in reply to Evan Prodromou • • •I think more folks are drawing parallels to RSS being dropped or XMPP being embraced and then dropped. Sure, both of those technologies are still useful and in active use, but they never recovered their ubiquity after they were dropped from common usage.
And I'd argue that email is waning for folks that haven't taken control of their inbox, but that's a separate, very long rant (erm, "discussion" π )
Evan Prodromou
in reply to Craig Maloney β • • •Craig Maloney β
in reply to Evan Prodromou • • •No worries. I've been seeing different conversations that were in a similar vein along those lines.
Returning you to your regularly scheduled thread. π
mav :happy_blob:
in reply to Evan Prodromou • • •After self-hosting my email for twenty-three years I have thrown in the towel. The oligopoly has won.
cfenollosa.comEvan Prodromou
in reply to mav :happy_blob: • • •@mav To that anecdote with a sample size of one?
I'd say that Open Source email servers are some of the most miserable pieces of software to work with on the planet.
I have a personal email server and keeping it running suuuuuuucks.
We need better email client and server software!
Lily Star
in reply to Evan Prodromou • • •mav :happy_blob:
in reply to Evan Prodromou • • •The meat of that anecdote didn't really have anything to do with *server software*, and everything to do with actually *getting your mail delivered*.
I take it that since you have an email server you disagree with the author's difficulties in actually getting messages delivered.
Evan Prodromou
in reply to mav :happy_blob: • • •DrJekyll
in reply to Evan Prodromou • • •@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' π
Dan Shick
in reply to Evan Prodromou • • •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 oneβs 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, weβd have better email client and server software that could handle that spam. as it stands, the few big sites call all the shots.
Dan Shick
in reply to Dan Shick • • •further: 1/3 of all email is a LOT of email, and i donβt see any evidence to support your claim that email is growing faster than Gmail. that seems wrong on its face.
i suppose you can argue the reversal of cause and effect here too, but i think some of us in the discussion will still perceive you as failing to respond to the meat of the argument put before you.
Evan Prodromou
in reply to Dan Shick • • •@datn @mav My numbers come from the Radicati email statistics report.
Could you put forward the meat of the argument?
I think "we're worried" is fine, but "Gmail took over email" is factually untrue.
Dan Shick
in reply to Evan Prodromou • • •I donβt have $2500 lying around for access to the Radicati report. iβd say the meat of the argument is somewhere between your two extremes, but closer to βGmail took over emailβ.
how about βdonβt you think giant for-profit companies will continue to screw over the open internet, specifically the fediverse?β but perhaps youβve already answered that to your own satisfaction. sorry to bother!
Evan Prodromou
in reply to Dan Shick • • •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.
Torsten likes this.
Dan Shick
in reply to Evan Prodromou • • •Evan Prodromou
in reply to Dan Shick • • •@datn @mav
radicati.com/wp/wp-content/uplβ¦
Evan Prodromou
in reply to Evan Prodromou • • •Dan Shick
in reply to Evan Prodromou • • •Evan Prodromou
in reply to Dan Shick • • •@datn @mav ah, OK. I don't have access to the full report. You're right, the data in the full report might not support the conclusions in the summary.
AFAIK, it's the gold standard for email network statistics. I'd love to hear better stats from an open publication!
SΓΆren
in reply to Evan Prodromou • • •Charles Roper
in reply to Evan Prodromou • • •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
Jim Parsons
in reply to Evan Prodromou • • •My βhere's to the crazy ones" thesis:
β’ any #Fediverse self-hosted instance as easy to set up as a Facebook account
β’ #Fediverse must easily straddle;
- PRIVATE
consumer individual family safe spaces
#privacy #encryption
β OPENWEB
shared public resource, common carrier status,
actual virtual-public-square not #Elmo absolutist illusion w/corp asses covered by #Section230
β’ SysAdmin a pain = opportunity
β’ market for #Privacy enabled
β’ new Laws needed, incumbents will resist
dick_turpin
in reply to Evan Prodromou • • •You make an excellent point.
I see so many people think that so many projects or movements are bigger than they actually are, mainly because they rarely step outside of the cacoon usage or interaction.
MikeK
in reply to Evan Prodromou • • •Guillaume Ross
in reply to Evan Prodromou • • •Evan Prodromou
in reply to Guillaume Ross • • •@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 • • •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.
Jons Mostovojs
in reply to Evan Prodromou • • •Jons Mostovojs
in reply to Evan Prodromou • • •Jons Mostovojs
in reply to 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. π
Evan Prodromou
in reply to Jons Mostovojs • • •Kaleissin
in reply to Evan Prodromou • • •Michael Roberts
in reply to Evan Prodromou • • •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.
Szymon SokΓ³Ε π΅π±πͺπΊπΊπ¦
in reply to Evan Prodromou • • •Evan Prodromou
in reply to Szymon SokΓ³Ε π΅π±πͺπΊπΊπ¦ • • •Floyd
in reply to Evan Prodromou • • •But take Gmail, Apple, and Microsoft and that's most of the market. Or with housing, there are 4 major players.
Both of those markets were once filled with many small and medium sized players.
Not saying the same will happen, I'm too new here to draw conclusions... But most markets that grow this way end up with 3-5 companies carving over 90% between them.
Karen Simpson
in reply to Evan Prodromou • • •Embrace. Extend. Extinguish.
And there goes ActivityPub....
M$ excels at that, see ActiveDirectory vs LDAP.
Google's more clever, they push DKIM and alike "in the name of security" ('cos "think of the children" won't stick,.it's not encryption) and then block your email 'cos it's spam.
The net result will be that those who are now using the fediverse will keep on doing so, and the newcomer "normies" will use a fediverse based on an incompatible doctored ActivityPub .
Then there's datascraping but they can do that with a simple client.
@cuchaz
Evan Prodromou
in reply to Karen Simpson • • •@vesperto @cuchaz
I am not scared of anyone joining this network. *They* are coming to *us*, not the other way around.
We are a robust and resilient network. We are gaining more and more people, implementations, and communications content every single day.
We have the power in this situation. Let's start acting like it.
Torsten likes this.
Karen Simpson
in reply to Evan Prodromou • • •That's the spirit, @evan, but I think you missed the point:
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embracβ¦
"Our" network is not imune to that.
Others on this thread also highlighted how Google EEE'd XMPP. The list goes on, ActivityPub is not free from risk.
And I'm cynical.
@cuchaz
Microsoft business strategy in acquiring software platforms
Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)Evan Prodromou
in reply to Karen Simpson • • •@vesperto yes, you're cynical.
We all benefit when big companies support open standards.
JSkier :archlinux: :debian:
in reply to Evan Prodromou • • •Sarah Brown
in reply to Evan Prodromou • •Neil E. Hodges likes this.
Evan Prodromou
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •Neil E. Hodges
in reply to Evan Prodromou • • •Phil L.
in reply to Evan Prodromou • • •I use 3 different email services
Gmail is only used to enable my Android devices
I could imagine a lot of people use this paradigm
Dietmar
in reply to Evan Prodromou • • •The numbers are hardly comparable. I doubt Gmail processes one third of email traffic. Maybe 10 percent
Paul Turnbull :CApride:
in reply to Evan Prodromou • • •Mark Connolly π» π΄πΌββοΈ (he, him, his)
in reply to Evan Prodromou • • •Evan Prodromou
in reply to Mark Connolly π» π΄πΌββοΈ (he, him, his) • • •PΔteris KriΕ‘jΔnis
in reply to Evan Prodromou • • •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.
Richard
in reply to Evan Prodromou • • •Johannes Ernst
in reply to Evan Prodromou • • •Matthew Jones
in reply to Evan Prodromou • • •Yup. 100% this. It's inevitable that there will be massive servers that most people end up on. That doesn't mean others won't exist and be able to thrive.
My accountant uses Hotmail. π€¦ββοΈ
Filipe
in reply to Evan Prodromou • • •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.
GNU Too
in reply to Evan Prodromou • • •Evan Prodromou
in reply to GNU Too • • •@gnu2
forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/β¦
Meta Is Creating A Decentralized Twitter Alternative Reportedly Codenamed βP92β
Siladitya Ray (Forbes)Bogie B. π¨π¦ πΊπΈ
in reply to Evan Prodromou • • •Dermot Casey
in reply to Evan Prodromou • • •Essem :skeeter:
in reply to Evan Prodromou • • •Coyote of Humidity
in reply to Evan Prodromou • • •Its all about how you frame things, right?
There is a robust and decentralized email ecosystem.
But with Google having a 25% market share, gives them an awfully big stick to wield when it comes to influencing standards and attitudes. You don't need to be market majority to be a possible malignancy on the entire ecosystem.
Aswath Rao πͺ·
in reply to Evan Prodromou • • •Anthony Bosio
in reply to Evan Prodromou • • •Evan Prodromou
Unknown parent • • •Chris
in reply to Evan Prodromou • • •@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.
mr_daemon
in reply to Evan Prodromou • • •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