The talk about “enshittification” made me think of the very email we use for the instances we signed up and instantly, it paints a grim picture. One of my account used gmail to sign up. Some proton mail. It reminds me that these too are companies beholden to their shareholders.

Is there a fediverse answer to email? Like what mastodon is to twitter and lemmy is for reddit?

If not, maybe the fediverse can think about allowing email-less sign-ups?

As an addendum, what about the popular tools we use in our daily lives? The calendar, note tools, etc all are products of companies driven to maximize profits.

There’s a talk in the technology sub about how GitHub was acquired by microsoft and I’m willing to bet that it’s not the only popular tool that was or will be endangered of disappearing or turning worse in the name of profit.

Is there a community movement that can somehow mitigate this? Or is there really no choice for us? Is there a complete list of FOSS somewhere that are at par or at least only mildly worse than the popular mainstream ones?

  • @CharlesDarwin
    28•1 year ago

    I pretty much thought federation was about trying to bring email-like qualities to other things where there was a gap being filled (and held back by) private enterprise, such as IM (Matrix, XMPP, IRC).

    Email is an example of a lot things done right as far as being decentralized. Sure, there are entities within Big Tech that have been working to fuck all that up…but there is a reason email is still here.