I did a short tootstorm thinking out the same problem and coming to some similar conclusions - you might be interested in where we diverge: https://indieweb.social/@tedcurran/113946323075198755
tedcurran
joined 1 month ago
one more reason why self hosted email just isn't competitive with free/cheap cloud email is the client UX. Gmail is very feature rich while your self hosted email will likely run on RoundCube or SquirrelMail which are extremely barebones.
RSS is a core feature of most content management systems like WordPress (which powers around half of all the web pages on the whole Internet) and many others besides. Most content sites, especially news sites, blogs, discussion forum software, etc. offer RSS by default unless they've disabled it for some reason. One the web, you can often just append /feed after the top level domain (like yourdomain.com/feed) but the easiest way is from within your RSS reader of choice. I like Inoreader and it has great tools for searching for feeds and subscribing.
I think if the smaller niche instances reflected a wider variety of interests so people could choose to belong to an instance the way people now belong to a subreddit, that would help. Right now there are only a small patchwork of instances that even have a basic level of users and uptime, and those might be targeted at specific identities that aren't widely relevant outside that niche community. Ideally people will bump around in one of the bigger instances, discover communities (and handles/domain names) that represent them, then migrate to that community. As long as migrating is mostly friction-free, I imagine people will do it just to get a cool domain name the way we did with free email in the 90s.