While I’m somewhat optimistic re Mastodon for niche nerding, I’m horrified by the romantic impression people have of email when using it as an argument.
Today, email is NOT a federated wonderland. It’s an oligopoly dominated by few capricious opaque players with 0 accountability.
There’s a lot of lessons in that and the fediverse would do well to learn them before it’s too late.
@clementd @hynek I had thoughts about exactly that in the last days: will some big mastodons (pun not unintended) take over the fediverse like gmail or microsoft did for e-mail and we’ll end-up with a fediverse whose rules end up being in practice dictated by them? What can we do to prevent that? (and is that even preventable?)
@hynek @clementd to give maybe a more similar story: gmail embraced xmpp long ago, then some day (when everyone had their chatting account hosted by them) they said "we close federation", and people outside of gmail.com effectively lost their buddies (and later xmpp at gmail became something else). What would be preventing that for activityPub?
@immae @hynek spam may be less of an issue with activity pub, as it's based on a subscription model.