The key difference between SMTP and ActivityPub is that SMTP arrived on the scene in an era when getting started on the internet (sorry, ARPANET) at all was a major technical feat. The median internet user in the two decades following the introduction of SMTP was plenty competent enough to handle the complexities of email, and once email became the standard way to communicate everyone <i>had</i> to figure it out. At first it was all that we had, and by the time centralized platforms started making things easier the network effects were so strong that they <i>had</i> to support SMTP.<p>Some people are putting Mastodon forward as a replacement for a centralized platform, but now the network effects are working in the same direction as the complexity friction—both are pushing you towards centralized platforms and away from Mastodon and company. For most people there's no incentive to overcome the barriers because they would be the first in their social circles to attempt it, and the centralized platforms so far have had little motivation to support ActivityPub because their users don't expect to interact with that ecosystem. If Threads really does implement ActivityPub I could see that changing, but that remains to be seen.<p>This doesn't mean that Mastodon doesn't have a place right now—if you're looking for a community that is specifically filtered to exclude those who aren't above average in technical competency, it'll do nicely. But it cannot serve the median internet user today.
Hey early responders: Christine's post is not actually about email, and she presumably believes email is just fine.<p>It's written to be a satire of critiques about federated social media services like Mastodon and Lemmy.
There's one big misconception here which really tears down the entire analogy from the beginning: you don't really choose your email server, and you were never intended to.<p>When email was developed, your email address would have been comprised of the computer you used (email is quite old) and your account name on said computer. As computers proliferated, the "computer" instead becomes "institution providing you with internet access", which would be your employer or your university (if a student), or your ISP if you manage to get home internet access. The email address is thus fundamentally tied to your source of internet [1], which also made it a useful unique identifier for the Web. But the desire for stability of this across ISP changes, as well as the need for multiple email accounts for a single household (kids don't want to use their parents' email address), propels the need for webhosted email accounts, email identities not specifically tied to your source of internet. And these email providers should be seen as exceptions to the general rule that email comes from your internet provider (although they probably provide the majority of email addresses now).<p>So the decentralization of email doesn't really create a "what server do I choose?" question, because the server is already chosen for you. And to the extent that the question does come up (when choosing a personal, permanent email provider), the evidence from the field is that the vast, vast, <i>vast</i> majority of people settle down for very few providers for this question (Gmail is close to a majority of personal email accounts, if not already there). From a <i>user's</i> perspective, email is not decentralized, and the confusion that Mastodon's decentralization brings isn't really an issue in email.<p>[1] And if you look up the version of email that was actually properly designed from the ground up as email (X.400), rather than accreting over time as SMTP et al did, it's even more apparent that email addresses are intended to come from your source of internet.
The email comparison often confuses people in my experience. They simply seem forget that email is federated when it comes to discussions like this.<p>I usually see these arguments from people who never had any interest in even trying Mastodon (or a related service).<p>In practice, there are only three large providers (Apple, Google, Microsoft, not necessarily in that order) that control whether or not your email gets delivered, so the comparison doesn't work entirely if you look at the modern web.<p>There also aren't that many Mastodon spam filters out there, but then again I haven't seen the same amounts of spam on there. I'm sure it'll get worse once Threads starts interacting with other servers and more people join the network, though.<p>Mastodon does solve the authenticity problem that SPF, DKIM, and DMARC have yet to solve in email. When you receive a message from steve@example.com, you don't need to dig through the headers to make sure it wasn't a Gmail signed envelope from some entirely different domain that happened to use the same server infrastructure like you need to with email.
I imagine if you tried “releasing” IMAP and SMTP email (with whatever cleanups and encryption you wanted to choose) now as a new open standard, in a world where email never existed, there is no chance it would take off.
> Oh and even better, apparently Gmail is starting to lock down access to your emails with only a username and password in the interest of "security", so you have to go through convoluted hoops in order to check your email in something that isn't the gmail web UI. It is literally impossible for me to check my work mail in something like Aerc.<p>Application specific passwords. If you have 2FA enabled on your Google account, you can create an app password for your account to use a client like Aerc or whatever.<p><a href="https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/185833?hl=en" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/185833?hl=en</a><p>Note, an organization may configure policies to disable this access.
<i>> This article was posted on M07 16 2023.</i><p>It's probably meant ironically (I see more reasonable date formats elsewhere on the site), but Americans will truly do <i>anything</i> to avoid using international standards.
Comparing Mastodon (or ActivityPub-related endeavors) to email is silly.<p>Mastodon is an open platform where people can post things publicly.<p>Email is private communication between individuals.<p>Petty disputes exist on Mastodon because admins can see what's being posted and talked about in <i>other</i> instances and so can choose to ban them just for personal spite.<p>How about your instance admin peeping into everyone's DMs and seeing which servers hold the most people talking against the Democratic party and then blocking all those instances?<p>Would you like that?<p>Well, that's what would need to happen with email to achieve a same 1:1 comparison
I thought this was actually about Mastodon given that people already have experience with email, and it was trying to draw parallels with the success of email. But it just ends by giving up..?
> Every mailing list has their own unspoken rules on how you're supposed to use your client, reply to emails, and more. If you break these rules, you're threatened with banning.<p>It's an interesting and mostly correct article overall, but I must come to the defence of email here.<p>I would say this is a rather unfair characterisation of Internet mailing lists. I've been a member of dozens, if not hundreds, of mailing lists; I have never seen a member threatened with a ban, let alone being ejected. This may have been the predominant culture twenty years ago (and the archives witness that), but times have changed.
I get that this is a satire post on the usual criticisms of Mastodon, but honestly the points on Email is valid, and the reasons are a big point on why non-business Email usage is declining…<p>Especially the points 'there's no real way to migrate between email servers either, so whatever I choose is going to be my permanent home' and 'I can't run my own server' parts are very valid criticisms of the Email system…
> What do you mean that the spamfilter software takes 12 gigabytes of ram, 4 CPU cores, and 35 GB of local space in order to work?<p>What software needs that? Mail in a box seems much lower for the whole stack: <a href="https://mailinabox.email/guide.html#machine" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://mailinabox.email/guide.html#machine</a>
EDIT: didn't realize this was satire when I wrote this<p>Setting it up from scratch is extremely annoying but there are foss solutions which manages everything mentioned and more, you only need to install & add the specified DNS records. Modoboa does a great job at this: <a href="https://modoboa.org/en/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://modoboa.org/en/</a><p>> Also apparently there's no real way to migrate between email servers either<p>This seems false (unless I'm misunderstanding), you can just setup a second mailserver, change DNS records and run IMAPsync to get everything transfered (backend-indepently), the only thing that would need additional consideration is passwords.
Haha. Email was a strange beast to understand back in the day. Of course, you needed to have access to the internet, your ISP, so you would default to their server. Whichever platform you were on had leading software, so you use the default. Not really that hard to figure out—it was all just new.<p>Since then, I’ve obtained my own domain name to have a ‘permanent’ (while I pay for the domain) email address.<p>Now I just forward these emails to my gmail account. I don’t have any hang-ups about google using my emails to train my AI overlord. Maybe the AI will recognize me like a country cousin?
It's been a while, but as I recall your ISP will provide you with an email address. So if you have internet, you have an email address. Sure, if you change your ISP then you have to update your email address everywhere. But the same is true for phone numbers if you change phone companies.<p>As for email clients, just use whatever Netscape comes with.