this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2023
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The idea that email is "truly open" demonstrates a ton of ignorance on this topic. Email is entirely controlled by like less than 20 large operators, who often completely ignore email from smaller servers.
Email is literally one of the worst examples of an open protocol. The fact that this person thinks for a second it is even comparable to ActivityPub in terms of openness should completely undermine their credibility in your mind.
I can host an email server. You can host an email server. Even if the big players choose not to accept mail from us, we can accept mail from each other.
I use sendmail notifications on every VM I host, and I use one of the "large operators" for my own email inboxes; I never have trouble getting messages from my VMs. The big players aren't blocking my little servers. Even if they did, they can only block the mailbox that they host. They don't host my VMs, and I am perfectly free to spin up my own mailbox to completely bypass their imposed limitations.
Contrast with a reddit, facebook, or twitter inboxes, which are entirely under the control of spez, zuck, and musk: they host (and thus control) both the sender and the receiver, as well as the path between them. Messages sent on their platforms are entirely at their whim.
Email is certainly an open protocol, and ActivityPub functions very similarly.
Yes, but my point was that those operators make up the vast majority of email accounts. Yes, all of your smaller servers can communicate with each other, but that doesn't matter when like 99.5% of the time, your target recipient will NOT be another small server.
Yes, email and ActivityPub are both decentralized, but that's about where the similarities end. Email, as a decentralized protocol, has been an abject failure. It is well known that big players DO actively block email from smaller servers often. Your individual experience is irrelevant. (For more details, see the thread at https://twitter.com/cfenollosa/status/1566484145446027265?lang=en)