>A lot of totally valid opinions out there about this, but I personally _love_ how the browser is becoming a very well-featured sandbox for shipping applications.
Unfortunately what's convenient for you as a developer is more often than not hostile and awful UX for me as a user.
A few months ago I wrote a comment on HN about algorithmic trading and someone emailed me about it. I sent him a reply from my self-hosted email domain, and I have no idea if he got it. I'm on a clean IP and clean domain, with a reputable hoster. I have SPF, DKIM, and DMARC set up correctly. Just last week I sent my gmail account a test email and sure enough it went to spam. There appears to be no rhyme or reason about it.
I believe the difference between people who say "email self-hosting is dead" and people who say "email self-hosting is trivial" is probably the volume of mail sent from their domain(s).
At my busiest, I was sending dozens of emails per day, but they were all from my work account. My personal account is pretty close to recv-only and probably averages an outgoing message count in the single digits per week. How can I reasonably keep an IP/domain reputation score fresh/warm if I send such a low volume? The answer is I realistically can't.
Self-hosted email remains an extremely difficult and time-consuming endeavor unless you happen to have some good luck, it seems.
>This is always how it's worked, and it's nearly impossible to join any instance without following & interacting with people from other instances on a daily basis. It's like the one thing about Mastodon you can't escape knowing about even if you actively try.
I don't use Mastodon, so perhaps that's why. It always seemed like a Twitter clone except with fewer people and, importantly for this particular discussion, where you can't interact with anyone.
Guess I was mistaken, but that's why I never bothered to learn anything further about it.
>The author seems under to be under the wrong impression that Mastodon servers are isolated communities (and therefore compares them to subreddits). This is incorrect. Mastodon is a platform where a server of your choosing hosts your account, like an e-mail provider hosting your inbox. From that account, you follow any other account on the network, regardless of which server hosts that account. Everyone you follow appears in your home feed, and everyone who follows you receives your posts in their home feed.
I've been aware of Mastodon pretty much since its inception and I had no idea that this was the case. The messaging really needs improved.