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" 😀 )

how would you respond to this? https://cfenollosa.com/blog/after-self-hosting-my-email-for-twenty-three-years-i-have-thrown-in-the-towel-the-oligopoly-has-won.html

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

My “here's to the crazy ones" thesis:

• any #Fediverse self-hosted instance as easy to set up as a Facebook account

• #Fediverse must easily straddle;

- PRIVATE
consumer individual family safe spaces
#privacy #encryption

– OPENWEB
shared public resource, common carrier status,
actual virtual-public-square not #Elmo absolutist illusion w/corp asses covered by #Section230

• SysAdmin a pain = opportunity

• market for #Privacy enabled

• new Laws needed, incumbents will resist

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.

As does the phone system

I feel like a significant portion of my own email (personal, which isn’t on gmail) ends up being written or received at gmail though. I wonder what the actual number is but I feel like it’s probably around 50%.

it absolutely doesn't. E-Mail is a cartel protocol you need millions of dollars to participate in.

you have an outright incorrect implication tbh. If you answer "big companies" argument with E-mail stats, you need to compare share of E-mail users who use a "big company" service vs self-hosters vs medium companies.

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.

1/3 is still way too many. And if you throw in some other big providers like Microsoft's outlook.com, the decentralization of e-mail seem more and more dwindling.

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.

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

Many alternatives to the big one too. #tutanota @Tutanota 🥂

@Evan Prodromou Problem is, I can’t email any gmail user from my own email because it marks it as spam.

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

I know various people who have at least one Gmail account for technical reasons. But next to none of them actively uses Gmail. And in my bubble most people have more than one email ...
The numbers are hardly comparable. I doubt Gmail processes one third of email traffic. Maybe 10 percent

I think there are also a lot of idle gmail accounts or ones that are used solely has signup emails. I know mine I used only for the latter when I set it up and now don’t use it at all. It’s just part of my Google account that I need to for the calendars (sharing) and a some Google docs stuff for gaming.

@josephby Do you know if the n7 beer of Gmail users includes accounts that have a custom domain? That is, not a gmail.com email address, but using gmail as underlying service? Not sure how big a difference it would make anyway.

I view it simple like that - can I move my mailbox away from GMail?
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.

if Microsoft, Google and Yahoo blocks your email server IP address you are effectively blocked from using email in the US and Western Europe. I guess you can still communicate with the people running their own servers, but claiming e-mail is still free and decentralized isn’t really true.

Absolutely correct. I think the Gmail analogy is apt, but not necessarily a bad outcome. I use Gmail, but I could always switch tomorrow to Outlook or hosted or my own server at home with no interruption in service. Yes, it is a big, corporate host, but I am not locked in like the non-federated social hosts.

I wonder what the e-mail market shares would look like by message traffic. E.g. I have an e-mail account from my broadband provider that probably would end up in the stats you quote, but that I never use. I don't even know its address.

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. 🤦‍♂️

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.

Is there more news about commercial networks joining the 'verse? I know there had been a lot of rumblings near the beginning of the #TwitterMigration but I hadn't heard of any progress actually having been made on that front

I work with a US based Fortune100 financial company. 50% of customers use GMail.

@jeffjarvis it took over the network in the sense it killed small self hosted mail servers. I ran one for 14 years… Outside gmail, hotmail, yahoo and office365 I doubt many people or companies host their own mail.

tbh I would be more inclined to agree if certain large providers didn't block mail from entire ISPs

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.

The ones I read were suggesting that a handful of email providers could summarily keep an email server out by blocking them wo an appeal. A similar thing could happen here even wo FB. #FediBlock

It’s increasingly difficult to get email sent in to gmail users from outside independent servers. Sure, they still accept email from other big players like Outlook and Yahoo, but most custom domains are treated as likely spam, even when they have never sent a single spam email.

@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.

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