Technology

While I can understand your sentiment, the problem is that many people simply didn't care, and hence they never demanded that from their providers or moved away when they added such anti-competitite policies.

For the large majority of humans, even understanding what the hell the internet is and what computers do is still a mystery. I can understand, that for most people, it was difficult enough to get used to email and cloud stuff in the first place.

But now, over the past decade, many people have often experienced the problems of corporate-owned non-decentralised services. (Twitter, EverNote, etc.)

And with these experiences, it's much easier to convince and have people move over to alternatives.

Again. I understand why you're 'angry'. And I feel that too. But I also see, that many people don't care and simply take the most comfortable options as they don't see the risks in lock-in.

Much like how this is just ActivityPub with a few extra metadata to thread them.

I don’t disagree, but I think it’s a bit of an oversimplification to attribute it all to capital. There is a failure in how the original internet (and traditional FOSS for that matter) envisioned the world.

The original vision was that everything will be distributed. There are protocols, there are implementations, and there are “users”. Where the term “user” encapsulated everyone from the person developing/contributing/maintaining the code, the person deploying and operating it, all the way to the grandparent or child or otherwise absolutely non-technical end user.

The idea was sound. You are a technical user, you could run email server for a set of people you know. Others could do the same. Small companies could start offering paid services, etc.

But the devil is always in the details. Who is maintaining it? Who is keeping everything secure and updated? How does it scale? How frequently do you need to migrate everything because the operator is going out of business or has come down with health issues, or has died. How much trust do you have to put in every operator? People don’t want downtime. People don’t want frequent migrations. People don’t want to have to trust hundreds of small providers and have churn all the time in services they rely on for their day to day.

The rise of a centralized, large, and popular operators of each type of service is inevitable in that case. A couple of large email providers were always distant to happen. Same with storage, messaging, etc. It’s difficult to selfhost everything yourself, and it’s incredibly burdensome to do it for free for a large number of people.

I mean, it's not like theres really anything stopping the big providers to implement PGP on top of Email.
They just don't, because users don't care. So you have to do it yourself, in a plugin or whatever.
Still works, just more cumbersome, but I wouldn't blame the protocol... at all.

No, encryption was considered. It was supported from pretty early on via PGP. If you check out decent mail clients (obligatory digdeeper), you'll find the tooling.

Finding communities can be painful indeed, and there are a few other wrinkles that I hope will be ironed out over time, like having the ability to hard delete posts and comments and having a setting to disable autorefresh.

There needs to be a directory that is universal.

I've been told people under {some age, maybe 35 now?} only use e-mail at work. I'm not actually sure how this is really possible, because you need e-mail to get all those "social accounts", as well as a lot of Government stuff (like DMV stuff), Banking and more, but it's what I've been told.

Because they use fone number to register for things instead

Well yes, if you simplify pretty much everything online enough it becomes "send message to this address".

With email, that's pretty much it.

With ActivityPub, after being received that message gets federated out to all servers that have a subscriber of whatever service the message was sent to.

The difference is more about implementation, conceptually. Email is just far more one-on-one