I don't know how I feel about email

Twenty some years later I am still on the same domain.

I initially ran my own email server. Spam filtering was easy.

Then things got more complicated.

Now I only use email for corporations to send me bills.

To the person just entering the world and getting exposed to computers and the internet I can almost understand the perspective.

There are a lot of silly things that exist because of necessity and systems being built over time.

Why isn't our mail just routed to a three-word address?

Like every tax system in government and system architecture, if we knew now how it would be implemented in used, we would do things differently.

There is a loss when oral history is removed from a culture. The stories of why are gone.

There is a warning, do not move the ancient landmarks. Do not tear down an old fence. After learning this I now ask, why is it this way?

The email comparison often confuses people in my experience. They simply seem forget that email is federated when it comes to discussions like this.

I usually see these arguments from people who never had any interest in even trying Mastodon (or a related service).

In practice, there are only three large providers (Apple, Google, Microsoft, not necessarily in that order) that control whether or not your email gets delivered, so the comparison doesn't work entirely if you look at the modern web.

There also aren't that many Mastodon spam filters out there, but then again I haven't seen the same amounts of spam on there. I'm sure it'll get worse once Threads starts interacting with other servers and more people join the network, though.

Mastodon does solve the authenticity problem that SPF, DKIM, and DMARC have yet to solve in email. When you receive a message from steve@example.com, you don't need to dig through the headers to make sure it wasn't a Gmail signed envelope from some entirely different domain that happened to use the same server infrastructure like you need to with email.

Are you saying email administrators are somehow above this all? They absolutely make weird personal choices when it comes to blocking servers and users. Microsoft will purge your account if it detects what appears to be a names child.

Take, for example, email delivery: if you're simply running a Tor relay (not an exit node) on the same IP address. You'll end up on a weird lists of blacklists not because there's any chance of abuse, but simply because they don't like Tor (or because they're too incompetent to distinguish between the two or too lazy to look up what those IP address lists mean).

The biggest difference between Mastodon and email is that you're less likely to interact with the petty administrators because people send fewer emails than they send toots. I promise you that free, community run email servers will be just as petty, shady, or unreliable as any hobbyist Mastodon instance.

> So either the product is so complex it can’t be simplified, or the developers of the project are so ignorant to user feedback that they aren’t willing to prioritize simplifying it. Both of these do not bode well for long term success or wide adoption.

The fediverse is not a product. The fediverse is an organization of humans willing to interact together. There are dozens of softwares, documentation on how it works and how to migrate, tens of thousands of instances each with different rules. The fediverse is a universe, not a plastic-wrapped package you buy and consume. The goal is not to capture the population as fast as possible, as seems to be the only valid metric on here, because that would mean coming back to where we started and not having advanced a single step

> if you can’t figure it out you shouldn’t use it

If you don't want to take the time to understand what it is, then you maybe you shouldn't use it. It's like coming to the house of a stranger: you don't know them, you try to understand the rules, ask around, maybe remove your shoes at the door or at least make sure it's ok if you keep them. But if you expect to enter without saying a word, picking beers in the fridge and shouting at people that's just rude. The fediverse is built to prevent exactly that.

> these are meant to be replacement services for widely adopted social networks.

No, there shouldn't be a replacement for social networks, the same way the web is not a replacement for something else: the web is one application that equalizes access and publication. The fediverse is a universe for everyone to have a voice and discuss and organize. Make conversing easy by giving back control to people.

> Oh and even better, apparently Gmail is starting to lock down access to your emails with only a username and password in the interest of "security", so you have to go through convoluted hoops in order to check your email in something that isn't the gmail web UI. It is literally impossible for me to check my work mail in something like Aerc.

Application specific passwords. If you have 2FA enabled on your Google account, you can create an app password for your account to use a client like Aerc or whatever.

https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/185833?hl=en

Note, an organization may configure policies to disable this access.