Yes a non-profit reddit would have been great, but not sure it would have made it this far. And probably couldn't have gone that route after it was acquired early on by Conde Nast in 2006.

> having to create legends of features they support

If you search for a new email provider, you'll see the same legends. Email adoption is not doomed.

Email adoption would be doomed if email was created today.

Small email providers are doomed, though. If they don't have an address from their ISP, just about everybody just gets a GMail account, or ProtonMail if they're more privacy focused.

I'd like to host my own mail but it's not worth it anymore thanks to spammers.

Are they? I'm seeing self-hosted Postfix as the most common mail server in scans. For free, personal email hosting I agree but that's just a fraction of the market.

https://lightmeter.io/global-email-map-2021/

For very general reasons small things outnumber big things. In the case of services this tends to mean that most users are using one of a very small set of providers despite the many smaller providers outnumbering the few big ones.

Wait until Lemmy spam becomes a problem. Consolidation will happen at that point and smaller instances will simply be restricted to being read only.

Reddit has the same problem, anybody can make an alt and spam random BS on small or large subs. Moderators just deal with it.

To your point: this conversation has pretty much convinced me to stop trying to figure Lemmy out and just hope Tildes pans out. I wanted to be a Lemmy adopter, but from an inability to sign-in and a complete disinterest in figuring out who is defederating from who (and why and what that means for me as a user) is giving me an allergic reaction to using it myself.

Yup I agree, plus right now it seems to be people that love internet drama.Drama of defederating and federating. I think to some people it's like a highschool clique that they get to run and it's just so hard to give a fuck about

Yeah having to worry about instances is already a fail. You should be able to search and join a "community" and the instance shouldn't even matter for the end-user. If the community / topic / "subreddit" you want to join does not exist, then you can spin up your own instance to host it, but until then instances should not even be a concern.

Exactly, each instance should have been separate communities tied via a “front page” that can also be self-hosted, using RSS to aggregate from each instanced community. Not multiple instances each with multiple similar communities that only serves to fracture an already minority of users.