this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2024
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This is mostly the case now due to centralized email by a few providers and bountiful bandwidth, but it was certainly not the case 20+ years ago.
People used to do the same with email before google and microsoft dominated email. It's just that in most cases, your ISP provided you with an email when you first signed up. Switching email provider currently is way more onerous than switching mastodon or lemmy providers. If each ISP nowadays hosten their own say, friendica server and provided you with a login immediately, it would have a similar effect of solving this difficulty of choosing.
It was such a thin sliver of time, and yet it's still so pungently 2023.
Look, I was there when email was a ISP thing. All emails looked the same everywhere because there was no support for anything but text, so that's a supremely nerdy nitpick that doesn't apply to the conversation.
Likewise to your other point. Nobody cares about all the mental gymnastics, the "it's like email" explanation doesn't work because no, it isn't, I can tell it isn't and no I'm not choosing anything, what are you talking about, I'm either signing up to a social network or I'm not.
Federation is a back end feature, it's transparent to users, users don't care about it. They will sign up for a thing and use it. Just like they signed up for gmail once and never thought about it again.
In any case, I'm not particularly keen on relitigating that. My solution to the concept of a social media endlessly repeating this argument and literally nothing else was to go elsewhere, so I'm good for now.
I very much remember the mess when HTML and rich text emails were introduced. I remember back and forths about missing attachments. It was nowhere near as rosy as you remember.
Anyway go touch grass or whatever. My point only is that email went though similar growing pains and it was only helped in the mainstream initially due to ISPs and later on due to massive centralization. The same thing we're trying to avoid with the fediverse.
No, I'm not saying it was rosy, I'm saying it was mostly text and then it was mostly hotmail and then it was mostly gmail.
And I'm saying none of that matters, because "it's just like email" is a weird meme that people try to use to justify the weird or hard to understand parts of Masto to normie users and it has never once worked. Because it's not just like email in any way that matters to an end user.
I have, in fact, touched grass today, though. So there's that.
the use of saying "it's like email" is to explain how lemmy.dbzer0.com can talk to lemmy.ml, similar to how gmail can talk to hotmail and why in fact there's lemmy.dbzer0.com and lemmy.ml (in the same way there's gmail and hotmail). That's it and doesn't need to go deeper than that to be a useful comparison.
Well, it does if the person on the receiving end gets nothing useful from it. That's my point, the confusion around Masto specifically wasn't "why do people with different handles get to talk to each other?" That's something that enthusiasts and developers care about and users don't even notice.
The question that was being asked was "why do I need to pick an instance at all and what does it affect?" and that didn't even BEGIN to explain the mess of themed instances, personal instances, effects of instance population on post distribution, manual blocks and defederations, what things did and did not make the leap cross-instance and the whole bunch of other details that matter.
A much better answer was "it doesn't matter, just sign in to mastodon.social and call it a day", but people used to be reticent to argue for centralization, because... decentralization!, so...
Ultimately the answer to that problem ended up going to Bluesky, which I think was very much a problem with both the design and the community at Masto. I actually think the Lemmy/MBin/Fedia Reddit-like corner of federated services is much more workable than a Twitter substitute. And it doesn't even need a bad email analogy to kinda just work, either.
Eh, whether bluesky is the answer remains to be seen.