A lot of people worry that commercial networks joining the fediverse will inevitably take over the network, "like Gmail took over email."
Except, y'know, Gmail hasn't taken over email.
There are 4.5B active email users (Radicati), 1.5B Gmail users (CNBC). About 1/3.
Email is growing faster than Gmail.
Maybe all the people you know use Gmail.
Maybe that says more about the people you know than about the state of the email network.
Email remains robust, decentralized and diverse in 2023.
@evan you have an outright incorrect implication tbh. If you answer "big companies" argument with E-mail stats, you need to compare share of E-mail users who use a "big company" service vs self-hosters vs medium companies.
@evan finally, when we compare Facebook's move with ActivityPub to Google, we seldom compare it to E-mail. We compare it to XMPP, which got extinguished by Google Talk defederation.
Even more finally: analogy is not an argument. While arguing with people who use analogy as an argument, it's more sound to point that out rather than finding a counter-analogy which may or may not be analogous enough. 🙂
@evan @jonn That's a popular opinion on #fediblock, yes
@jonn so, you're saying that people should preemptively defed Meta, because Google defedding XMPP killed XMPP?