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Comment by M2Ys4U | Hacker News Reader

There's one of these posts every month, and predictably the author dunks on Mastodon for not having a monetisation strategy.

That is a good thing. Keep your VC-powered enshittification[0] away from us, please.

> All of the 3rd party integrations are happening with ActivityPub, not Mastodon

That's like saying the web is doomed because all of the integrations are happening with HTTP and not Google Chrome. Yeah, that's the point. That's where integrations are supposed to happen, using the standardised protocol.

[0] https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

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[OP] I wrote the article because putting the time and financial burden of operating large distributed networks on individuals is not maintainable. The fact that the parent company has no plans to change that except to make it more expensive and complicated for individuals (switching to Kubernetes) is why I think it will fail to reach its intended goals.

The example I gave was email. Lots of things integrate with email at a protocol level but Gmail won because 1) it had better features 2) lots of things integrated with it directly

Would you build an IMAP/SMTP/POP3 product today? ActivityPub support will end up being a checkbox or buried setting.

Strange that you use a still-popular, decentralized, open-standard global service with a myriad of paid and free providers, for which there exists dozens of open-source clients and servers across the planet, all of which integrate with each other... as a model for why Mastodon won't work.

Why do you say "gmail won"? Did gmail switch to a proprietary, closed protocol? Did they lose compatibility with even the smallest, independent email servers? (That was rhetorical-- provided those smaller servers adopt appropriate open, non-proprietary anti-spam measures (DMARC, SPF, DKIM, etc), they work fine.)

Meanwhile, no one uses AOL's old proprietary mail system, if it exists any more.

Bittorrent, multiple file sharing protocols, and other distributed peer-to-peer systems and are doing very well.

Email lost because spam is an extremely difficult problem and because large email providers decided to become an oligopoly and shut off smaller providers.

Email lost? What do you mean by lost? Email is still here some 50+ years since its invention and it’s used everywhere across the globe.

The point is it lost because Joe and Jane doesn't want to spin up their own email server even though they can.

But even if they did, once Gmail and Outlook block them in their spam filters they have just been de-federated from the billions of accounts to send emails to, let alone fight the mountains of spam going on in email.

So the biggest providers have won and email, with centralization.

> Lots of things integrate with email at a protocol level but Gmail won because (...)

What are you talking about? I spend all day every day sending and receiving emails from all sorts of services, and Gmail is not it. What exactly is your definition of "won"?

I’d guess he’s referring to the most common use of the phrase and means market share. And yes, gmail won

> I’d guess he’s referring to the most common use of the phrase and means market share.

That makes no sense at all. Are you actually trying to argue that your perceived popularity of an email provider is proof that email is dead? While actually referring to the popularity of email as a whole?

> And yes, gmail won

According to some sources, Gmail has a 36% market share of email. This means that the remaining 64% share is not held by Gmail. Do you look at this and think that email as an open federated non-centralized service is doomed? Absolutely ridiculous.

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