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A lot of people worry that commercial networks joining the fediverse will inevitably take over the network, "like Gmail took over email."

Except, y'know, Gmail hasn't taken over email.

There are 4.5B active email users (Radicati), 1.5B Gmail users (CNBC). About 1/3.

Maybe all the people you know use Gmail.

Maybe that says more about the people you know than about the state of the email network.

Email remains robust, decentralized and diverse in 2023.
This entry was edited (1 year ago)
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" πŸ˜€ )
@craigmaloney OK, but this post isn't about RSS or XMPP. It's about email.
No worries. I've been seeing different conversations that were in a similar vein along those lines.

Returning you to your regularly scheduled thread. 😁
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
@mav To that anecdote with a sample size of one?

I'd say that Open Source email servers are some of the most miserable pieces of software to work with on the planet.

I have a personal email server and keeping it running suuuuuuucks.

We need better email client and server software!
@mav Postfix is a dream compared to Sendmail. The only thing that sucks is cloud providers inability to regulate spam generators on their services.
The meat of that anecdote didn't really have anything to do with *server software*, and everything to do with actually *getting your mail delivered*.

I take it that since you have an email server you disagree with the author's difficulties in actually getting messages delivered.
@mav I think getting messages delivered is hard, yes.
@mav I have a couple of domains, and it doesn't have to be hard.

I use a 3rd party to host the email for the domains and my name registrar has clear steps on now to setup the security / antispam features required.

Probably took a couple of hours to setup (most of the time waiting for things to propagate).

But yes, running hardware yourself is more involved of course, I'm just wanting to point out that there is a 'middle ground' πŸ˜€
sample size is much larger than one. this article has made many rounds through my networks; each time all the old heads like me pour one out for the days when one could run one’s own server.

the reason is spam, and the response of the dominant email providers to that spam. i believe if we had fewer monolithic email providers, we’d have better email client and server software that could handle that spam. as it stands, the few big sites call all the shots.
further: 1/3 of all email is a LOT of email, and i don’t see any evidence to support your claim that email is growing faster than Gmail. that seems wrong on its face.

i suppose you can argue the reversal of cause and effect here too, but i think some of us in the discussion will still perceive you as failing to respond to the meat of the argument put before you.
@datn @mav My numbers come from the Radicati email statistics report.

Could you put forward the meat of the argument?

I think "we're worried" is fine, but "Gmail took over email" is factually untrue.
I don’t have $2500 lying around for access to the Radicati report. i’d say the meat of the argument is somewhere between your two extremes, but closer to β€œGmail took over email”.

how about β€œdon’t you think giant for-profit companies will continue to screw over the open internet, specifically the fediverse?” but perhaps you’ve already answered that to your own satisfaction. sorry to bother!
the previous years' versions are available free of charge.

I think that people who say that Network X is going to ruin the fediverse are the same people who say that the fediverse will never be viable until it includes Network X.

You can think of a million reasons why the fediverse is going to fail, or why every good thing that happens is actually bad.

Or you can build the network and make social software more free.
This entry was edited (1 year ago)
@datn @mav also, I took "Email is growing faster than Gmail" out of the original post, because it's not central to the argument. Let me know what you find!
well, you linked me to the executive summary, so i’m still no wiser. it’s not important, though; i believe we will just have to agree to disagree. thank you for being civil!
@datn @mav ah, OK. I don't have access to the full report. You're right, the data in the full report might not support the conclusions in the summary.

AFAIK, it's the gold standard for email network statistics. I'd love to hear better stats from an open publication!
@mav better server software does nothing to fight against the oligopoly of Gmail, Exchange, etc., who will greylist you whenever they feel like it because you’re to small to protest. (No, SPF and DKIM won’t suffice.)
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 β€œhere's to the crazy ones" thesis:

β€’ any #Fediverse self-hosted instance as easy to set up as a Facebook account

β€’ #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

β€’ SysAdmin a pain = opportunity

β€’ market for #Privacy enabled

β€’ 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%.
@g right. Let's try this:

A, B and C are people with email addresses.

B has Gmail, A and C do not.

There are nine possible email messages: A to B, A to C, B to A, B to C, C to A, C to B, A to B and C, B to A and C, C to A and B.

Only 2/9 or about 22% don't go through Gmail.

"I see a lot of stuff come through Gmail" is reasonable, but it doesn't mean everybody uses Gmail.
To get the real numbers I guess I could dump a few years of email and parse MX records for domains, but it's safe to say a large portion of it does as your scenario shows.

I think it's not that big of a problem as I never felt like I *had* to have a gmail email account, but I do feel like self-hosting has gotten much worse in the last decade or two due to hard to use software, aggressive spam filtering on the big providers that are biased against small ones etc.
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.
finally, when we compare Facebook's move with ActivityPub to Google, we seldom compare it to E-mail. We compare it to XMPP, which got extinguished by Google Talk defederation.

Even more finally: analogy is not an argument. While arguing with people who use analogy as an argument, it's more sound to point that out rather than finding a counter-analogy which may or may not be analogous enough. πŸ™‚
@jonn so, you're saying that people should preemptively defed Meta, because Google defedding XMPP killed XMPP?
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
@vesperto @cuchaz

I am not scared of anyone joining this network. *They* are coming to *us*, not the other way around.

We are a robust and resilient network. We are gaining more and more people, implementations, and communications content every single day.

We have the power in this situation. Let's start acting like it.
That's the spirit, @evan, but I think you missed the point:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish

"Our" network is not imune to that.
Others on this thread also highlighted how Google EEE'd XMPP. The list goes on, ActivityPub is not free from risk.

And I'm cynical.

@cuchaz
@vesperto yes, you're cynical.

We all benefit when big companies support open standards.
Many alternatives to the big one too. #tutanota @Tutanota πŸ₯‚
@Evan Prodromou Problem is, I can’t email any gmail user from my own email because it marks it as spam.
@goatsarah there are some tricks to that!
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. πŸ€¦β€β™‚οΈ
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
thanks! That's pretty awesome.
@gnu2 It is. They haven't confirmed that they'll be using ActivityPub. It's absolutely possible they'll use some snowflake protocol like Blue Sky did.
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
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