If you were to set up your own SMTP server and try to deliver mail, you essentially cannot reliably email any of the larger providers, because they’ve taken steps to mitigate spam and issues which also makes it impossible to handle your own email anymore, even if the intent wasn’t explicitly to break self-hosting.

But this isn’t true either? I can easily spin up a SMTP server on a homelab, create an MX record, and email my friends with Gmail accounts as if I was emailing from my Protonmail or Gmail account.

I appreciate you acknowledging your bias against central providers, but to be honest I think it’s leading to some incorrect conclusions. This discussion is also kind of getting derailed, but I’d be happy to continue debating about it.

With the Fediverse, you probably don’t actually want giant servers, as you’re just repeating the concentration of users and thus power in the network into a smaller, fewer set of hands.

I’m of the opinion that it’s ok and natural for a few larger servers to emerge. The reason why I think it’s natural is because normal people frankly don’t care about the nuanced benefits about finding an instance that caters to their exact moderation preferences or philosophical pontifications about why Big Tech is bad. They just want to click on funny images, upvote them, and maybe comment once in a while.

I think that’s ok since I believe the ultimate goal of social media sites is to serve content for users’ consumption in a non-abusive way. The reason why I believe the fediverse is probably better than traditional social media is because it gives the power of choice. That power doesn’t need to be executed, but because it’s baked into the platform the users always have the ability to exercise it. If a large instance decides to screw over its users, then the users can simply move to another instance and still have full access to the network’s content. That power alone is what makes me ok with having few large instances.

the reason people use one of the large providers is that the large providers have taken malicious and aggressive steps to break the ability of smaller providers to talk to them, in the name of “security”.

This is just a false statement; I can email my friends on GMail just fine from my Protonmail account. I think you’re meaning to characterize malicious methods to keep people on the platform, but that issue is orthogonal to getting people registered.

The issue Lemmy has right now is getting normal people registered.

Re Mastodon: Tbh I’m not sure. I’m also a reddit refugee and have been exploring different fediverse services. I think how mastodon implements it is as a sort of “authenticated redirect”. Not to sure on how ActivityPub supports one account controlling another account on ActivityPub. Maybe could be implemented as a sort of keyring, where the most recent account on the newest instance has tokens for each of the past accounts on the old instances so that their posts can be transparently modified by the most recent account?

Or maybe this is a non-issue and people can just make new accounts on different instances.

based. Thank you for your service to the Revolution 🫡

To be honest I feel like even that’s too complicated. Most people don’t really care about the great technology behind the product; they just want a product that works. That’s in part why the current large social media networks are so large; registration is so easy. The moment you add friction in the form of learning how federation works, normal users will become jaded and just decide not to join the network. If the goal right now is to improve the network effect offered by lemmy, we need to do as much as possible to minimize the amount of people we turn away.

This isn’t to say that we should focus completely on the “default instances”. I agree that ultimately the goal should be to have people move to smaller instances which take advantage of more of lemmy’s wider philosophy. But I think that the first step should be to introduce people to the concept of the fediverse, and then have them interact with it as intended.

Im honestly not so sure about the “more intuitive over time” part. I feel like a lot of people who are using lemmy currently are already pretty technically inclined, and they’re already mildly confused as to how accounts work. If that’s the case, imagine how a normal person feels. I don’t think we can rely on things getting smoothed out over time if we’re to maximize the short-term intake of users caused by the reddit exodus.

The way I see it, the benefit of federation is that it gives you the option/freedom to move to another instance later on while still being able to access all the network’s content.

I’m not sure if lemmy currently has this feature, but for example Mastodon allows a user to move their account to another instance. It’s not necessary for someone to move their account, but having the ability to is nice. A way to think about it is that it builds the ability to flee an instance into the platform itself, but doesn’t penalize the user from fleeing an instance. Unlike reddit where people are fleeing but now they lose access to all the content reddit has.

I think a barrier to wide-spread adoption of lemmy is that for a regular joe, the instance system is a bit confusing. I’m seeing a lot of people comparing the instances to email servers, but I think something they’re missing is that there are a few large email providers which most people default to (e.g. gmail, yahoo, etc.) and a bunch of smaller ones which people go to if they disagree with the policies of the larger ones (e.g. protonmail)

I think that if lemmy is to replace reddit as the most widely-used link aggregator, we need some kind of default server (or set of default servers) which is large enough that people feel comfortable with settling in on. That way user base growth isn’t hindered by confusion. If they later decide that a smaller instance suits their needs better (whether that be the moderation practices or site reliability), they can uproot and move their account there.

I looked around for an instance like a landing server and found lemm.ee. The admin advertises the intention of this instance to be something like a landing server, so maybe direct confused people to there and let them explore after settling in?