this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2024
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Fediverse

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A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).

If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to [email protected]!

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Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy

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[–] [email protected] 46 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

It's like running your own email server in the early 2000s. For large businesses it totally makes sense.

Hobbiests can do it to if they are interested.

Most people will land at a "shared" service and let someone else handle the admin tasks. I'm afraid that eventually there might only be "outlook.com, gmail.com, and yahoo.com" so to speak, because it's just the easy way to go for most people and economies of scale make it more feasible for the operators who find ways to get paid.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 10 months ago

People misunderstand what federation needs to do. Email is a great model.

It's fine to have big providers. What federation does is limit the fuckery possible. Imagine what would happen if GMail started charging $8 a month.

Having the option for competition doesn't mean you have to use it. It's enough that it's possible.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 10 months ago (2 children)

But people self host email today, and there are many more email orgs around including private work email and specialised services such as Proton mail focusing on privacy and security. It's a good analogy.

An open standard like Mastodon will allow big players but also niche and small players, who can focus on specific communities or offering specific spins.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Totally agree. The smtp protocol server to server interoperability made email all work smoothly across many federated hosts and I think ActivityPub is more or less designed with a similar strategy, except for defederations. I guess the equivalent would be blocking spam at your smtp gateway, lol.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Do people actually self host mail? I remember watching some conference that said it is basically a full time job nowadays to get your mails actually delivered if you're not one of the big providers. Much easier to pay one of them and just use a custom domain instead, and I can easily see this being a thing for the fediverse one day too (assuming it ever gets big enough)

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

I selfhost my own email and you are absolutely correct it is musch easier to receive than to send. I use a 3rd party to send all my outgoing mail on my behalf.