akavel

Yep, that’s exactly the sentiment I saw in people’s writing, that email has become almost centralized in practice, even though in theory it’s not. I saw this also generalized, that even successfuly promoted distributed/federated protocols still face the constant risk and challenge of becoming centralized in practice, when a major player manages to capture the majority of the field.

AFAIU, even Mastodon community needs to (and does) purposefully work on promoting alternative instances, so that not everybody ends up on mastodon.social…

FWIW, from what I read, the difficulty in selfhosting email is mainly in how to not get your outgoing mail insta-plonked by increasingly fussy and moody spam filters. Shows up that a huge percentage of receivers are now on gmail, trailed by a few other major players like M$, and you’re on their whimsy, with no way to appeal plonk decisions (and challenging to even find out if they plonked or not). This was reported so even before the era of “AI”, I wouldn’t be surprised if it were even harder now.