People don't use email as social network or instant form of social communication.
>Centralisation is more convenient in almost ALL cases, even in email (nobody except people on HN host their own email)
Email's just so damned old everyone uses the standard and it kind of dodges the issue.
Email's also structurally a bit different - it's a set of one-way sends to select recipients, with chats you moreso go to a place and read the place's signboard.
You could in principle just use mailing lists under the hood instead if the UI wasn't garbage.
https://trends.google.de/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=bl...
People cannot find their friends on Mastodon because:
+ They can't search all instances across Mastodon.
+ There is almost little to no one on Mastodon to talk to.
So they just go back to a centralised service like Twitter and they definitely not use email as a social network.
I have found that this is an accurate description of the first impression one gets; this is not true, but we're all so used to recommendation algorithms easing discovery that the impression is equivalent.
Twitter is just fine and everyone knows it.
email isn't a social network and lots people outside of HN don't self host them as such.
Business email is very dependent on the fact that it’s an open protocol.
And so the word comes down, we have to move to Gmail. It’s believable decision making, but that’s how it works.
People don't self host email because 1) the protocol doesn't make it easy to deal with incoming spam on a small scale, and 2) giants like gmail tend to automatically flag unique email domains as suspicious. Which is a valid criticism of the federated model, or rather the people using it.
If more people found value in decentralization, in theory they would also be more critical of their node management, opting to reject anti-competitive behavior in a democratic way. Unfortunately, for democracy to work, citizens have to be educated and fight for it. If they don't, it's easy to have centralized, ostensibly totalitarian walled gardens.
We just need to make sure fediverse accounts are easily transferable between nodes in a standardized way, something I don't think mastodon does well, and email doesn't do at all.
Seriously: Transforming spam filtering into a black box service has decommoditized email and everyone knows it.
Bob registers his new Twitter handle so I, Alice, can find it on the central service of Twitter.
A mapping of users to users can be across any service, including centralized to centralized (ie Twitter to Facebook) or decentalized to decentralized (IE Diaspora to Mastadon). It is just saying this string registered somewhere else as that string.