Anil DashBleh. Just saw a friend who found out they couldn’t be followed by one of their friends because (unbeknownst to both parties) the moderators of their friend’s instance had defederated from their own instance. All of this, for people who barely know what any of these terms mean. What they experience is, “Two people you’ve never met have a beef you’ve never heard about over an issue you don’t know about, so your friend can’t see you. And there’s no fix.” It’s just terrible all around.
Glyph@anildash One of the most annoying ideas in the fediverse is the idea that we should abstract over the idea of an "instance" or automatically roulette people into different tiny instances to avoid making Mastodon gGmbH too powerful and because "instance choice" is a scary and irrelevant technical detail. The instance you're signing up for is the *service* you're signing up for. When people talk about email, they intuitively understand. You sign up for GMail, you don't sign up for "SMTP".
Paco Hope@glyph It’s interesting to see this conversation in my timeline just 5 posts away from this:
@paco @anildash I think that distribution actually looks relatively healthy as far as what it's sampling. notice that "other" remains larger than many large players; none of these people are entering work email addresses in this context; gmail is at 75% not 99%; lots of *applications* (dnalounge itself, for example) can easily use non-gmail for interfacing with consumers who largely use gmail.
@glyph I don’t know if you have run your own email server. I’ve been self-hosting mine since 1999. We’d like to think that SMTP is this neutral Internet standard and everybody obeys it, even Google. That’s not the case. If 75% of people use one service, and you want to interact with those people, you run your mail server how Google wants you to, whether that’s how the RFC says or not.
There are parts of the standard that are optional (DKIM, DMARC, etc). Google says “unless you do DKIM, your mail goes to our users’ spam folders.” DKIM is no longer optional if you want GMail users to get your email. GMail’s deliverability rules are the Internet’s deliverability rules.
The same could happen to ActivityPub or any other protocol. 75% is well more than what it takes to dominate. 25% of us can email each other following the RFCs. But if we want to email the other 75%, we do what Google says.