Comment on BBC: Extending our Mastodon social media trial
nucleative@lemmy.world 4 months ago
It’s like running your own email server on the early 2000s. For large businesses it totally makes sense.
Hobbiests can do it to if they are interested.
Most people will land at a “shared” service and let someone else handle the admin tasks. I’m afraid that eventually there might only be “outlook.com, gmail.com, and yahoo.com” so to speak, because it’s just the easy way to go for most people and economies of scale make it more feasible for the operators who find ways to get paid.
But people self host email today, and there are many more email orgs around including private work email and specialised services such as Proton mail focusing on privacy and security. It’s a good analogy.
An open standard like Mastodon will allow big players but also niche and small players, who can focus on specific communities or offering specific spins.
Totally agree. The smtp protocol server to server interoperability made enail it all work smoothly acrossany federated hosts and I think ActivityPub is more or less designed with a similar strategy, except for defederations. I guess the equivalent would be blocking spam at your smtp gateway, lol.
Do people actually self host mail? I remember watching some conference that said it is basically a full time job nowadays to get your mails actually delivered if you're not one of the big providers. Much easier to pay one of them and just use a custom domain instead, and I can easily see this being a thing for the fediverse one day too (assuming it ever gets big enough)
I selfhost my own email and you are absolutely correct it is musch easier to receive than to send. I use a 3rd party to send all my outgoing mail on my behalf.
Serinus@lemmy.world 4 months ago
People misunderstand what federation needs to do. Email is a great model.
It’s fine to have big providers. What federation does is limit the fuckery possible. Imagine what would happen if GMail started charging $8 a month.
Having the option for competition doesn’t mean you have to use it. It’s enough that it’s possible.
bob@beamship.mpaq.org 4 months ago
@Serinus @nucleative
Humm, they do charge for some options like the "business account" but have blocked even allowing you to use an email reader that is not theirs. I know, I've been trying use all the things that used to be free...
Serinus@lemmy.world 4 months ago
If you go to another domain (or even one of your own), you can still talk to all the people who use GMail.
Maybe GMail should choose to defederate, so GMail accounts would no longer be able to receive from or send emails to non-GMail accounts. Then maybe they could trap people and charge more.