"[...] People seem to hate email for the same reasons they once loved it. Email's underlying triumph, the quality that made it revolutionary, was that you could instantly deliver a written message to someone even if they weren't there to receive it. [...] Email is neutral, meaning that anyone can email anyone else with an email address. If you have a person's email address, your message will be delivered no matter who you are - whether the recipient is your oldest friend, your granddaughter, your boss's boss, or Beyoncé. The year the web was born, this flattening effect was astonishing. Anyone in an organization could communicate directly and immediately with anyone else, "regardless of rank" [...]"
- Adrienne LaFrance, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/01/what-comes-after-email/422625/" rel="nofollow">https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/01/what-...</a><p>I'd like to add one more very important aspect: you don't need to register with any or with yet another service, which will eventually fade into oblivion within a few years - or which will become so ignorant to privacy, like Facebook, that you end up deleting their apps and accounts.<p>Email is a set of protocol and thus it _will_ outlive any centalised, closed, walled garden.<p>(BTW this is what decentralisation people should understand: you need to build services using common protocols, not services which can be installed; mastodon is a bad example, activityfeeds or linked data are good ones)