Earlier quoted context omitted.
What’s shocking is everyone can wrap their heads around regular country post offices, emails, in general distinct entities interacting, but lose their minds when you tell them about mastodon. Just tell them it’s email for twitter. Just like you can interact with anyone who’s email address you know so too with their mastodon handle. The only real difference is that everyone also publishes all their “emails” for anyone…
Oh please. The consolidation has affected email equally to the point where "email" is synonymous to "gmail". No one is signing up for email by searching for other email clients, setting up SMTP and whatnot. They go to Google, search for "email" click on the sign up link to "gmail" and carry on. I hardly believe even more than 1% of email users even know about its federated nature Unless Mastodon has similarly sensibl…
You're completely ignoring the corporate world, which may outweigh consumer email use (dunno, but it wouldn't surprise me.)
G Suite isn't even close to a monopoly, and I imagine there's large IT departments at anti-cloud corpos specifically for managing all their emails.
It's like, consumers don't know or care if they're using Linux, but they would definitely care if everything using it went away. Consumers aren't where Linux "won" either, it won on servers.
All this to say email is more centralized than it should be, but its decentralization is absolutely still important for its continued relevance.
If you take away the decentralization and Gmail were to become its own private messaging service, it would have the momentum to carry on for a while. But it would surely die. 5 years, maybe 10. But I have no doubt it would suffocate itself.
I know lawyers and founders who have Hotmail and AOL.com addresses, so I'd jump ship day one. One mass "Hey guys Gmail is bad here's my new email" to all my contacts (or as much as spam prevention allows...) and done.