Are you kidding? The vast majority just use Gmail now, or perhaps an institutional account they were enrolled in “automatically” and have a strong motive to check regularly for school/work purposes.

Right. Most people get their email from work, school, their ISP, or from their OS provider: Google, Microsoft, Apple.

If you present people with a list of 30 email providers they've never heard of before, it's going to throw them for a loop.

I don't think any people get their email from their ISP these days.

I know for a fact that they do.

Fascinating. Would you name the ISP(s), if I may ask?

Users think of Mastodon as analogous to Twitter. You can tell them they are wrong. But telling new and eager users they are wrong, and then offering an elaborate explanation as to why they are wrong and then requiring them to make a confusing choice with unclear consequences before they can even use the service is not a great strategy for growth.

In practice we don't see situations arising where Yahoo users can't send email to Gmail users because the boss of Gmail doesn't like that that the boss of Yahoo allows Fastmail users to send email to Yahoo users

This right here is my primary problem with Mastodon. Its ripe for drama like this. The amount of glee I saw in the older users their about defedrating felt really unsettling. "If X company comes we will defedarate them" "If X celebrity comes we will defedarate them".

Exactly this, it's like the most emotionally immature people on Twitter have been given an even more powerful blocklist to play with. Like thousands of mini-Musks with their own volatility problems.

This isn't true. In fact we do see email providers getting blocked, mainly because of spam or other unwanted emails being sent from a provider.

https://www.google.com/search?q=why+is+gmail+blocking+my+ema...

yes we do. remember when Yahoo email to mailing lists went straight to GMail spam for a while because GMail didn't like how Yahoo managed its headers?

Well, for the most part they don't, they use either their ISP e-mail, their work e-mail, or Gmail. iCloud might be a distant runner up. I rarely see anybody using even Yahoo or hotmail anymore.