Not only did Facebook and GChat refuse to peer with little players, they refused to peer among the big players too. We could have had something like IRC for the masses, peered chat servers with bring-your-own-client. Instead, we waited decades for iMessage to get Android support which only happened long after everyone moved on to IG, Messenger, WeChat, etc.
Email is probably one of the last great open[ish] distributed systems we’ll ever see. There are just too many incentives to build walled gardens instead.
Going the self-host route, I'd still want a service of some sort so I didn't have to maintain it myself. Almost like an evergreen program that self-hosts my data and synchronizes and backups and transfers anything and everything.
Everything would be accessible outside of the program as local human readable or viewable files where possible. That'd be the best way to be non-walled garden.
I've had several email providers die since the 1980s. Each time it was a major disruption in my life. The last time, I coped by mostly dispensing with email whenever possible. Like most people I have a "good" email address for important things, that I check weekly, and a "garbage" email address I only bother to check when I have a need to.
Hosting my own mail server, not subject to some provider's ideas of filtering, or simply vanishing in the night, would make email more attractive. But the festering mess that SMTP email evolved into isn't just something you can set up in an evening. It's not even a hobby. It looks pretty much like at least a part-time job. Weighing the options, I don't really need email that badly.
If only one entity does it, as far as I can imagine it is only a marketing statement to appeal to a niche demographic - people who care about it from an ideological standpoint.
If more than one entity does it, it could lower the bar for critical mass. Instead of having to get enough people on your platform to start benefiting from the network effect, you only have to get enough people on your platform and platforms that you have bidirectional integration with.
Really, a format should be created (e.g. file.[short|vine], etc.) that could be then edited by any editor and viewed by any viewer, and all that you'd need to do to copy a YT short to a facebook reel is to copy the file itself to each platform.
It's literally the same exact concept over and over again, just wall gardened instead. So much wasted development time doing the exact same thing.
XMPP doesn't even support E2E encryption out of the box. It's as outmoded as IRC.
That would be an open relay. That is simply not something that mail servers do anymore. If one was to deliberately set up an open relay, one would find that their email server was blacklisted pretty much immediately.
I self-host my mail for over 17 years. Most of the spam I'm observing those days comes from hacked/broken websites (sometimes it's probably some stolen SMTP credentials, sometimes sent from the server directly). Legit domain name, SPF and even DKIM present, looks totally legit in this regard - only stopped by RBLs and content filtering.
I remember back in the day having to change your SMTP settings whenever you travelled to whatever the ISP was where you were staying. then you could finally send email from your @homeisp.example email
Store and forward.
Do remember that email was THE great federated protocol.
The goal of a mail server was to get your email "at least one hop" closer to your destination. And that wasn't an easy task.
Servers came online and went offline. Users logged in and out. Connections came up and went down. IP wasn't the only transit. DNS? Oh, the hosts file? Even higher things--thing DECnet and Janet.
Email was barely functional most days. Your best bet if you weren't an Internet God and weren't able to write your own super complicated sendmail.cf was to know a sysadmin at a node who had an Internet God and ask him if you could forward emails that you couldn't handle to their server.
Unfortunately, greedy people soon jumped in to take advantage of this generosity, resulting in a tragedy of the commons.
John Gilmore used to run an open relay, and I used to get spam from it. He was really stubborn about promoting the freedom of the spammers over the peace and quiet of the poor recipients. He eventually got shut down, still complaining.
Because the people on the 'net were generally not bad actors back in the day, so we would you need to lock things down?
There are types of bulk unsolicited email/web-comments which involve text without links, but they aren't spam per se; they're (the initial bait emails for) scams.
(And the usual solution to scam postings on forums, is to prevent people from sharing any off-forum contact details, except maybe via forum private message. No Nigerian prince is going to run their whole scam through the forum; they want/need to convert you ASAP into having a non-intermediated conversation with them. So they won't bother with any forum where they can't stuff their email address / Telegram handle / etc into each post.)
But if this is only a fight between admins, the intuition is that we would end up with the big instances constantly losing users to smaller ones (created by those breaking away from the bad admins) who would then federate among themselves.
I’d love a world where data was truly distributed and federated, but unfortunately, the barrier of entry is too high. Because of this people will start hosting nodes for people. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but network effects will take over, and we’ll be back where we started.
Look at git. It’s distributed in all the right ways, but almost everyone uses github.
The web is decentralized, but the same few websites dominate to the point that people — even people on this very site — think that you can’t post a video except to YouTube.
This also allows authors to seamlessly switch servers without losing audience or at least being able to recreate it very easily.
Perhaps some kind of blockchain would be a solution? (No, I'm not trying to appeal to tech investors, I actually think it might offer just the solution here :P )
The experience behind this predated peer-to-peer electronic cash and related developments. You may be right, and it may still be too soon. But problems can be solved.
Looking at the 30 years and millions of dollars poured into making email work, the evidence seems to be against this
There is no technical solution for people being assholes.
Well OK there is - turn off computer or server :)
The right to peer implies the right to not peer.
(1) People are turning their noses up at Mastodon because all of Twitter isn't already there and because you'll be cut off from instances that aren't federated with yours.
(2) People are worried about "all of Twitter" becoming more people than they would like. There are communities they'd rather be cut off from and words they'd rather not read.
It's not a bug, it's a feature. Unfortunately, very influential companies that have figured out how to game our attention have tricked users into thinking they want something they don't.
No? Even if you don't want to force smaller instances to peer (which generally makes sense) you can apply more strict requirements to huge instances that contain a significant portion of the population.
The only technical way maybe. You could always legislate that large enough networks MUST peer.
PoW has been the best solution so far.
I think the only way to make distributed social media practical is to have an extremely inexpensive turnkey self-hosting solution for the average person. A Chromecast-like device that they plug into their TV that backs up all their photos, plays music, and also hosts a Mastodon instance. Some kind of very friendly backup solution where you make an "emergency contacts" list, and the device encrypts all of your data and stores it on your emergency contacts' devices as a backup, and vice-versa.