That's a good point and it illustrates what the solution is too. Email, is a series of protocols: POP3, SMTP and IMAP; thus they don't suffer issues with HTTP (a different protocol) that this article describes. The Web mail apps are just a client to serve your email protocol data to you. While the web apps do suffer from the HTTP issues, you at least have the freedom to switch your clients, and even the servers of your email data.

webmail doesn't tend to have the problem of sharing pieces of content via hyperlink, which is the problem the author is talking about.

fediverse apps do fine as clients to access pieces of content through their own dedicated communication channels, in the same way webmail clients do.

Mail breaks down as soon as everyone starts broadcasting to everyone else.

Also the reason why ppl behind mail and chat never saw social media coming. Social media can't work on top of those protocols so they thought it would fail.

Nor did anyone imagine that everyone has such a desperate craving for Attention or this Need to broadcast their thoughts to the entire planet every day. Its still not clear why this even has any value. Its sort of like trying to build a brain where every neuron has broadcast capability to every other neurons. Our brains would just fry if such capability existed. There would be so much noise nothing would make sense.

But ppl have decided this is what they need to build to escape Google and Facebook or whoever. And the whole story doesn't really make too much sense.

>Its still not clear why this even has any value.

It's simply human nature. The scale simply increased from a family ornfriend group, to community, to a world population.

Media reflects reality in this case.

I don't think you really understand social media if you think everybody talks to everybody.

Building an audience is a job for many people. It takes work to have your message be heard.

Ppl are not thinking to deeply abt what problem is being solved. They are just reacting.

Telling everyone to build and grow audience is very nice, until you realize (1) the Total Available Eyeballs are not growing. So new problems are being caused by this unescapable fact, as ppl try harder and harder for less and less (2) lot of ppl who deserve attention just get drowned out.

If you ask the decentralizing crowd what should be done about it or whether their work is going to make a diff they haven't thought about it. What's the use of designing essentially decentralised broadcast to replace centraliazed social media broadcasts without thinking about the limited eyeballs/info overload problem?

I've had the opinion for years that any federated social media platform should fallback to email as a default. This helps solve the problem of bootstrapping an audience. You should be able to "tweet" at your friends by using their emails. It should show up on the public record as an unclaimed account.

That account could authenticate at any time through their email to claim it. You could send a "tweet" by just sending an email to [email protected]. [follow-up verification link can be sent to approve with one click to prove email.]

I don't understand how this idea isn't more obvious to all these new platforms. We need to lower barriers to entry to decentralization.

My assumption here is that ActivityPub doesn't have a full implementation of email protocols. I don't know how difficult it is to bridge this.

Also, unfortunately eMail has long fallen to spam. If I'm not searching for it, I won't actively look too deeply into an email from an unknown user.

I don't know, but I dont remember POP/IMAP/SMTP to be lean enough for that kind of usage. Fast social media timelines are in few kpost/sec. range.

e: but sounds like a correct approach too

Emails aren't sent to the whole world and linked to on websites though