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A lot of people worry that commercial networks joining the fediverse will inevitably take over the network, "like Gmail took over email."

Except, y'know, Gmail hasn't taken over email.

There are 4.5B active email users (Radicati), 1.5B Gmail users (CNBC). About 1/3.

Maybe all the people you know use Gmail.

Maybe that says more about the people you know than about the state of the email network.

Email remains robust, decentralized and diverse in 2023.
This entry was edited (1 year ago)

Neil E. Hodges reshared this.

in reply to Evan Prodromou

I think more folks are drawing parallels to RSS being dropped or XMPP being embraced and then dropped. Sure, both of those technologies are still useful and in active use, but they never recovered their ubiquity after they were dropped from common usage.

And I'd argue that email is waning for folks that haven't taken control of their inbox, but that's a separate, very long rant (erm, "discussion" :) )
in reply to Craig Maloney ☕

OK, but this post isn't about RSS or XMPP. It's about email.
in reply to Evan Prodromou

No worries. I've been seeing different conversations that were in a similar vein along those lines.

Returning you to your regularly scheduled thread. 😁
in reply to Evan Prodromou

how would you respond to this? https://cfenollosa.com/blog/after-self-hosting-my-email-for-twenty-three-years-i-have-thrown-in-the-towel-the-oligopoly-has-won.html
in reply to mav :happy_blob:

To that anecdote with a sample size of one?

I'd say that Open Source email servers are some of the most miserable pieces of software to work with on the planet.

I have a personal email server and keeping it running suuuuuuucks.

We need better email client and server software!
in reply to Evan Prodromou

Postfix is a dream compared to Sendmail. The only thing that sucks is cloud providers inability to regulate spam generators on their services.
in reply to Evan Prodromou

The meat of that anecdote didn't really have anything to do with *server software*, and everything to do with actually *getting your mail delivered*.

I take it that since you have an email server you disagree with the author's difficulties in actually getting messages delivered.
in reply to Evan Prodromou

I have a couple of domains, and it doesn't have to be hard.

I use a 3rd party to host the email for the domains and my name registrar has clear steps on now to setup the security / antispam features required.

Probably took a couple of hours to setup (most of the time waiting for things to propagate).

But yes, running hardware yourself is more involved of course, I'm just wanting to point out that there is a 'middle ground' :)
in reply to Evan Prodromou

sample size is much larger than one. this article has made many rounds through my networks; each time all the old heads like me pour one out for the days when one could run one’s own server.

the reason is spam, and the response of the dominant email providers to that spam. i believe if we had fewer monolithic email providers, we’d have better email client and server software that could handle that spam. as it stands, the few big sites call all the shots.
in reply to Dan Shick

further: 1/3 of all email is a LOT of email, and i don’t see any evidence to support your claim that email is growing faster than Gmail. that seems wrong on its face.

i suppose you can argue the reversal of cause and effect here too, but i think some of us in the discussion will still perceive you as failing to respond to the meat of the argument put before you.
in reply to Dan Shick

My numbers come from the Radicati email statistics report.

Could you put forward the meat of the argument?

I think "we're worried" is fine, but "Gmail took over email" is factually untrue.
in reply to Evan Prodromou

I don’t have $2500 lying around for access to the Radicati report. i’d say the meat of the argument is somewhere between your two extremes, but closer to “Gmail took over email”.

how about “don’t you think giant for-profit companies will continue to screw over the open internet, specifically the fediverse?” but perhaps you’ve already answered that to your own satisfaction. sorry to bother!
in reply to Dan Shick

the previous years' versions are available free of charge.

I think that people who say that Network X is going to ruin the fediverse are the same people who say that the fediverse will never be viable until it includes Network X.

You can think of a million reasons why the fediverse is going to fail, or why every good thing that happens is actually bad.

Or you can build the network and make social software more free.
This entry was edited (1 year ago)
in reply to Evan Prodromou

also, I took "Email is growing faster than Gmail" out of the original post, because it's not central to the argument. Let me know what you find!
in reply to Evan Prodromou

well, you linked me to the executive summary, so i’m still no wiser. it’s not important, though; i believe we will just have to agree to disagree. thank you for being civil!
in reply to Dan Shick

ah, OK. I don't have access to the full report. You're right, the data in the full report might not support the conclusions in the summary.

AFAIK, it's the gold standard for email network statistics. I'd love to hear better stats from an open publication!
in reply to Evan Prodromou

better server software does nothing to fight against the oligopoly of Gmail, Exchange, etc., who will greylist you whenever they feel like it because you’re to small to protest. (No, SPF and DKIM won’t suffice.)
in reply to Evan Prodromou

Email products I use:

1. Outlook.com
2. Microsoft 365 (work email)
3. Around 10 email forwarders associated with personal domains and products
4. Several IMAP/SMTP accounts on cPanel domains w/Roundcube web client
5. A couple of Tutanota accounts
6. A Protonmail account
7. Paid up Firefox Relay customer
8. DuckDuckGo Email Protection relay user
9. Mailbird email client on desktop
10. Several GMail accounts

Email is beautiful in its diverse, multi-faceted glory.

cc @chriscoyier
in reply to Evan Prodromou

My “here's to the crazy ones" thesis:

• any #Fediverse self-hosted instance as easy to set up as a Facebook account

• #Fediverse must easily straddle;

- PRIVATE
consumer individual family safe spaces
#privacy #encryption

– OPENWEB
shared public resource, common carrier status,
actual virtual-public-square not #Elmo absolutist illusion w/corp asses covered by #Section230

• SysAdmin a pain = opportunity

• market for #Privacy enabled

• new Laws needed, incumbents will resist
in reply to Evan Prodromou

You make an excellent point.

I see so many people think that so many projects or movements are bigger than they actually are, mainly because they rarely step outside of the cacoon usage or interaction.
in reply to Evan Prodromou

I feel like a significant portion of my own email (personal, which isn’t on gmail) ends up being written or received at gmail though. I wonder what the actual number is but I feel like it’s probably around 50%.
in reply to Guillaume Ross

right. Let's try this:

A, B and C are people with email addresses.

B has Gmail, A and C do not.

There are nine possible email messages: A to B, A to C, B to A, B to C, C to A, C to B, A to B and C, B to A and C, C to A and B.

Only 2/9 or about 22% don't go through Gmail.

"I see a lot of stuff come through Gmail" is reasonable, but it doesn't mean everybody uses Gmail.
in reply to Evan Prodromou

To get the real numbers I guess I could dump a few years of email and parse MX records for domains, but it's safe to say a large portion of it does as your scenario shows.

I think it's not that big of a problem as I never felt like I *had* to have a gmail email account, but I do feel like self-hosting has gotten much worse in the last decade or two due to hard to use software, aggressive spam filtering on the big providers that are biased against small ones etc.
in reply to Evan Prodromou

it absolutely doesn't. E-Mail is a cartel protocol you need millions of dollars to participate in.
in reply to Evan Prodromou

you have an outright incorrect implication tbh. If you answer "big companies" argument with E-mail stats, you need to compare share of E-mail users who use a "big company" service vs self-hosters vs medium companies.
in reply to Jons Mostovojs

finally, when we compare Facebook's move with ActivityPub to Google, we seldom compare it to E-mail. We compare it to XMPP, which got extinguished by Google Talk defederation.

Even more finally: analogy is not an argument. While arguing with people who use analogy as an argument, it's more sound to point that out rather than finding a counter-analogy which may or may not be analogous enough. 🙂
in reply to Jons Mostovojs

so, you're saying that people should preemptively defed Meta, because Google defedding XMPP killed XMPP?
in reply to Evan Prodromou

Gmail is still a big enough gorilla it doesn't have to follow rules, though. When it classified *my* server as spam, it sent no diagnostic messages. Just stopped accepting mail, inconveniencing nobody except the people I try to email. And me.

Meta will do the same for the fediverse. Embrace, extend, and attempt to extinguish, because even a tiny additional shard of market share is worth any amount of irritation for others, if it doesn't cost me anything.
in reply to Evan Prodromou

But take Gmail, Apple, and Microsoft and that's most of the market. Or with housing, there are 4 major players.

Both of those markets were once filled with many small and medium sized players.

Not saying the same will happen, I'm too new here to draw conclusions... But most markets that grow this way end up with 3-5 companies carving over 90% between them.
in reply to Evan Prodromou

Embrace. Extend. Extinguish.
And there goes ActivityPub....

M$ excels at that, see ActiveDirectory vs LDAP.
Google's more clever, they push DKIM and alike "in the name of security" ('cos "think of the children" won't stick,.it's not encryption) and then block your email 'cos it's spam.

The net result will be that those who are now using the fediverse will keep on doing so, and the newcomer "normies" will use a fediverse based on an incompatible doctored ActivityPub .

Then there's datascraping but they can do that with a simple client.

@cuchaz
in reply to Karen Simpson

I am not scared of anyone joining this network. *They* are coming to *us*, not the other way around.

We are a robust and resilient network. We are gaining more and more people, implementations, and communications content every single day.

We have the power in this situation. Let's start acting like it.
in reply to Evan Prodromou

That's the spirit, @evan, but I think you missed the point:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish

"Our" network is not imune to that.
Others on this thread also highlighted how Google EEE'd XMPP. The list goes on, ActivityPub is not free from risk.

And I'm cynical.

@cuchaz
in reply to Karen Simpson

yes, you're cynical.

We all benefit when big companies support open standards.
in reply to Evan Prodromou

@Evan Prodromou Problem is, I can’t email any gmail user from my own email because it marks it as spam.
in reply to Evan Prodromou

And even if you follow those tricks, there's a decent chance it'll still be marked as spam.
in reply to Evan Prodromou

I use 3 different email services

Gmail is only used to enable my Android devices

I could imagine a lot of people use this paradigm
in reply to Evan Prodromou

I know various people who have at least one Gmail account for technical reasons. But next to none of them actively uses Gmail. And in my bubble most people have more than one email ...
The numbers are hardly comparable. I doubt Gmail processes one third of email traffic. Maybe 10 percent
in reply to Evan Prodromou

I think there are also a lot of idle gmail accounts or ones that are used solely has signup emails. I know mine I used only for the latter when I set it up and now don’t use it at all. It’s just part of my Google account that I need to for the calendars (sharing) and a some Google docs stuff for gaming.
in reply to Evan Prodromou

@josephby Do you know if the n7 beer of Gmail users includes accounts that have a custom domain? That is, not a gmail.com email address, but using gmail as underlying service? Not sure how big a difference it would make anyway.
in reply to Evan Prodromou

I view it simple like that - can I move my mailbox away from GMail?
I can. I might not want to, it wouldn't be worth my time. But still - I can roll out my own server, and there are literately hundreds of very good mail services. And while running email server has been challenging last 15 years, core is still the same.
So yes, actual federation matters and being afraid someone swooping in is pointless at the moment.
in reply to Evan Prodromou

if Microsoft, Google and Yahoo blocks your email server IP address you are effectively blocked from using email in the US and Western Europe. I guess you can still communicate with the people running their own servers, but claiming e-mail is still free and decentralized isn’t really true.
in reply to Evan Prodromou

Absolutely correct. I think the Gmail analogy is apt, but not necessarily a bad outcome. I use Gmail, but I could always switch tomorrow to Outlook or hosted or my own server at home with no interruption in service. Yes, it is a big, corporate host, but I am not locked in like the non-federated social hosts.
in reply to Evan Prodromou

I wonder what the e-mail market shares would look like by message traffic. E.g. I have an e-mail account from my broadband provider that probably would end up in the stats you quote, but that I never use. I don't even know its address.
in reply to Evan Prodromou

Yup. 100% this. It's inevitable that there will be massive servers that most people end up on. That doesn't mean others won't exist and be able to thrive.

My accountant uses Hotmail. 🤦‍♂️
in reply to Evan Prodromou

I believe the problem is not just that email is run on Gmail servers, but that Gmail takes up enough accounts that if you want to be a server communicating with all accounts, you have to play by their rules. Even if you don't host on Gmail, you will follow their commands. I think.

Either way, I believe the right "conspiracy theory" would be to accuse Gmail, Microsoft and Yahoo of oligopoly, and not just Gmail of monopoly.
in reply to Evan Prodromou

Is there more news about commercial networks joining the 'verse? I know there had been a lot of rumblings near the beginning of the #TwitterMigration but I hadn't heard of any progress actually having been made on that front
in reply to GNU Too

It is. They haven't confirmed that they'll be using ActivityPub. It's absolutely possible they'll use some snowflake protocol like Blue Sky did.
in reply to Evan Prodromou

I work with a US based Fortune100 financial company. 50% of customers use GMail.
in reply to Evan Prodromou

@jeffjarvis it took over the network in the sense it killed small self hosted mail servers. I ran one for 14 years… Outside gmail, hotmail, yahoo and office365 I doubt many people or companies host their own mail.
in reply to Evan Prodromou

tbh I would be more inclined to agree if certain large providers didn't block mail from entire ISPs
in reply to Evan Prodromou

Its all about how you frame things, right?

There is a robust and decentralized email ecosystem.

But with Google having a 25% market share, gives them an awfully big stick to wield when it comes to influencing standards and attitudes. You don't need to be market majority to be a possible malignancy on the entire ecosystem.
in reply to Evan Prodromou

The ones I read were suggesting that a handful of email providers could summarily keep an email server out by blocking them wo an appeal. A similar thing could happen here even wo FB. #FediBlock
in reply to Evan Prodromou

It’s increasingly difficult to get email sent in to gmail users from outside independent servers. Sure, they still accept email from other big players like Outlook and Yahoo, but most custom domains are treated as likely spam, even when they have never sent a single spam email.
in reply to Evan Prodromou

@i_dabble given how networks work, I'd be curious to see how much email communication (sans spam) happens outside google's (or the big 5's) purview.

My gut feeling is that as most businesses rely on either gmail or some Microsoft thing, most communication invariably touches their servers.

This puts them in the powerful position to set the rules you either play by or are excluded.

This is not about blame, but to caution: I expect similar spam patterns to email to emerge with activitypub.
in reply to Evan Prodromou

And yet because big email hosts (microsoft hosted exchange/360, gmail, hotmail, etc) are the overwhelming majority of platforms providing the service, this has had a negative impact on the rest of the internet.

If I may expand this thought: I'm a SRE/systems administrator by trade and I have setup my fair share of MTA/MDA stacks -- all you needed back then to run email was a static ip, a matching reverse DNS name, MX records and someone who knows what they are doing to some degree. 1/2