A very detailed article about the whole Meta (Instagram/Threads) vs. Fediverse discussions. It’s a long read, but well-worth it if you’re interested in the subject.
A very detailed article about the whole Meta (Instagram/Threads) vs. Fediverse discussions. It’s a long read, but well-worth it if you’re interested in the subject.
Not convinced by the e-mail analogy rebuttal. There are plenty of small e-mail providers thriving alongside the giants. Nothing is stopping you today from paying your friendly local business or association to host a mailbox for you. Of course self-hosting e-mail is an absolute pain, but that’s because most e-mail sent is spam, the drastic blocking is just needed. Similarly if the Fediverse sees any kind of meaningful adoption, preemptively blocking small instances will be needed to crack down on spam.
I’m cautiously optimistic about Meta adopting Activitypub for their new platform. It might signal enough interest to make other smaller (and more trustworthy!) actors follow suit and set up their own platforms or Mastodon instances.
Indeed. It’s a bit of fake news that the e-mail market is dominated by a handfull of big players. It’s enterely possible to self-host a small e-mail server and have to e-mail accepted without problems. Of course, don’t run and open relay, and make sure your reverse dns and DMARC and DKIM records are correct.
@tinselpar @sdx I disagree. I’ve been self-hosting my email since 1998. I routinely end up on blacklists and low-reputation IP lists and other situations that limit my email from reaching people.
The big players like gmail, outlook, yahoo have absolutely no method of appeal or explanation. You can submit to an opaque form and maybe email starts getting delivered again. But you’ll never get a reason or even a notification that they made a change. It is a constant labour: So much so that I pay a monitoring service to alert me if my server ends up on a list somewhere.
Look at paco.to and look for issues. It’s “right” in terms of SMTP standards and compliance. This stuff happens to me ALL THE TIME.
I was emailing my local government office and had to call them to find out why they weren’t replying. All my mail was going into a junk folder for no reason that I could see or control.
When big players adopt something, small players must also, or we lose the ability to send email to massive numbers of people.
So while it is “possible” to run your own small email server, the dominance of a few absolutely massive players makes it a lot of work for the small operator.
We’re both offering anecdotal evidence, but I have been working with mail servers of various kinds for the better part of 15 years and I have never seen an IP or mail server wind up on a blacklist for “no reason”
I think a difference between email and ActivityPub-based social media is there’s arguably less of a need to have federation between any two servers. If you can’t email the government, your sister living abroad, or a client, that’s a big problem. But if you can’t follow a cat pictures account or your friend’s constant stream of baseball rants because the servers don’t federate it’s not quite the same.
If Meta becomes ActivityPub interoperable instances may or may not federate with them. Either way it’s not necessarily going to change my social media experience.