I think email's a fine way to communicate that gets a bad rap either because: spam, google et al. making it harder to host your own mail server, actually people just hate work email because they don't like work (reasonable).
So I feel bad for all the mastodon people who are saying "it's like email" and how basically everyone is going to have a negative reaction to that even though it should be reasonable and good. It was nice when everything used XMPP and I could just use Adium to chat
One of the main problems with gnusocial/mastodon is that it isn't just like email, it has the pitfalls and problems of email but little of the useful functionality and also has the problems of twitter to boot...
I feel like the analogy largely works on a technical level but isn't especially relevant to people's concerns. I don't have especially high views of the fediverse—I'm on a small private instance, and I've largely enjoyed my time there, but I also do not federate and do not interact with people off-instance.
I feel like this post by coryw basically nailed my feelings when it said mastodon both hates twitter and desperately wants to be twitter. Also deeply skeptical of a system built around volunteer administration/moderation. It has been interesting to see that the non-insignificant anarchist interest in it hasn't resulted in a server you can really run on those principles (did you know you can't make announcements or add emoji unless you're an admin?! not the biggest part of this point but whatever). Anyway, I've got like 3 long posts I want to make about social media stuff because obviously being loud on sites means I'm an expert
I mean part of the problem with an actually anarchist server is that computer security models don't want to work that way and more to the point the software isn't written that way so you'd need enough expertise to rewrite the server to support that kind of governance model. But more to the point my issue with the metaphor is that it's pretty deceptive because there's a lot of things about email that don't hold true about gnusocial, most especially when you send someone an email the whole world isn't privy to it
yeah, I don't primarily see email from other people on my email server and I am not associated with other people on my email server unless it's an absolute spam nest
