I'm not going to argue this point until I'm blue in the face with you. Because at some point this kind of stuff is why open protocols always lose.
If the motives aren’t engaging and delivering value to users, I’m not sure it has value beyond being a curiosity. If those are the motives, then it is a product. Not realising that is the classic trucks-versus-trains mistake. (Railroads didn’t initially see trucks as competition, because they were railroads, and trucks were trucks, while in reality, they were all freight. The railroads went bankrupt and were restructured.)
The monetary transaction is there
A highway is not a product, it's infrastructure. In the same way, Mastodon is infrastructure. If someone sells a Mastodon app, that's a product, just like someone selling traffic cones or a car is selling a product.
Not everything in the world is a product. We don't live in a world of products and the void.
It’s not a product the way email isn’t a product. gmail is a product, and gmail is email.
As long as there’s no gmail for mastadon, mastadon won’t reach its final form.
gmail is one of the main reasons why e-mail is mostly dead outside coroprations.
Yes, some old nerds (like me) still are subscribed to some mailing lists (like FreeBSD developers' ones), but it is mammoth turd, not life.
gmail killed good desktop clients (and it is only so-so client by itself, with unusable filters, absence of proper threads and many other advanced features of now-defunct proper e-mail clients), and it try to create closed garden instead of federation (if your emails from self-hosted server never was shadow-banned by gmail, you are very lucky men).
So your example is very... illustrative, so to say.
Gmail is one of the main reasons why email is used by almost everyone. Together. It made e-mail truly accessible, and made it so anyone can use email, and can email anyone else.
It was always used by corps (or universities), and some indie folk ram it themselves (I too tried running mine on-off for like 5 years and gave up recently). Gmail was one of the people that made it harder for indie folks, in the name of spam prevention, but it hardly killed e-mail.
Everyone has email now. It’s not a walled garden, it’s just productized and made palatable for the masses. Apple runs an e-mail service too, as does most major tech companies. There are plenty of third party clients, with plenty of features, gmail be damned. I use third party clients, and they solve my needs, so i know they exist, even if maybe the ones you wanted don’t exist.
> So your example is very... illustrative, so to say.
Yes. While I disagree with your view on the state of email, I think that if I’m right about a successful mastadon, we’ll have parallel opinions then too.
Are you sure? When do you receive e-mail from live person, not robot (yes, each online shop will spam your forever after one buy), neither notification from automated system neither forum and not related to you job?
I'm 45, and I'm using email from 1997, but I can not remember when I receive or send "personal letter" by e-mail for last, hmmm, five years? Yes, of course, there are tons of e-mails at my $job (but, again, mostly from automated systems, persons prefer Slack now!), there are ton of notifications, promotions, etc. Also, yes, I'm dinosaur and I'm using mailing lists for some "nerdy" and very old-skool projects, which is nearest thing to person-to-person communication in my inbox.
All real person-to-person communication with my (extended) family, friends, many groups of interest (not connected to IT, like hiking or off-road motorcycling) are in other media now - mostly Telegram groups. Not e-mail.
And before gmail (2004) I can not remember any person I want to communicate who was equipped with PC and didn't have e-mail. And ICQ. Which required e-mail to register, not phone number. Of course, my grandma didn't have e-mail in 2004, but she didn't have any device for it in 2004, either.
I’m not quite as old, and haven’t spent quite as much time using e-mail, but my memory says that I’ve basically always received vaguely the same amount of human emails, but the automated volume has continued to increase.
Native apps are a dying bread and email apps are incredibly complex, making it a terrible business with a few exceptions. Gmail also has the best search and filters you can find in any email app.
My new $job uses gmail-for-business as e-mail and it is very inconvenient. In HR process I've received each email from this company to my own domain, but not e-mails with meeting invitations. Why? Nobody knows. Nobody could debug. Because gmail. It was not problem on my side, my MTA didn;t get connections from gmail side for such messages. Plain text - Ok. Meeting invitation - go directly yo black hole. Why? BECAUSE GOOGLE. I was forced to use my gmail account (which I use for garbage registrations on different sites) for this communication.
My own (and not only my) messages from self-hosted domains sometimes gives 450 on gmail. Why? Nobody knows. It looks like spam. From domain with crystal-clear history for 10+ years according to all anti-spam services. It could be 450 now ad 200 in hour. It could be 550 now and 200 when re-sended without changing any letter. And, worse of all, it could be 200 on SMTP level and never shown in recipient's inbox (including SPAM folder!). Shadow ban. For one message out of 10 this day. Why? Because google. So much for federation!
And now I need to use gmail at my new $job. Oh my. Filters are so primitive after sieve... And it can not be solved on client side, of course...
EDIT:
I have one simple question about "best filters" - how to create filter which will place message under label which is derived from content of "List-Id" header, not known beforehand? It is trivial task in sieve (including stripping common domains and creating hierarchical folders from long names with delimiters), but I can not find solution for gmail "best filters".