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by kstrauser 3347 days ago
I think the federation model of Mastodon is nearly identical to SMTP + mailing lists. When you create your own mailserver, it's an island. You can join some mailing lists to meet new people, or you can contact them directly if you know their address. By design, you and I can both have "foo@<different_instances>".

You can have ten different email addresses or Mastodon accounts if you wish. By default, they are separate. If you want them to mirror each other's content, you have to do that manually. I'm OK with this.
2 comments
x1798DE 3347 days ago
One problem with this is that if an instance is a "mailing list", it's currently not possible to join multiple mailing lists with the same e-mail address. That said this would not be as big a problem with e-mail addresses as it is in Mastadon; as WorldMaker mentions, the analogy breaks down because of the public feed - if you want to create an alias, you need to duplicate your public feed, and if you have things like the federated feed and hashtag search, you're going to end up with a lot of duplicated content out there.

If you had a lot of people cross-posting to different mailing lists with similar subscriber lists, I imagine people would be really annoyed if they had no way of merging your duplicated content.

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WorldMaker 3347 days ago
The difference is that email don't have communal public feeds like the instance feed and the instance federated feed. More of my thoughts wound up here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14159523
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kstrauser 3347 days ago
That's why I added "...and mailing lists". If each email server had a default "local-msgs@example.com" list that everyone was subscribed to, it'd look a lot like Mastodon.
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WorldMaker 3347 days ago
That would be the first thing most email servers would disable.

Email has never had such a thing and likely never will, now that we understand the deep perils of spam. Mastodon has a problem email doesn't have because email doesn't want it.

A better example might be to look to email's "sister" NNTP, which hardly anyone uses these days because no one could figure out the spam problem. People switched to privately maintained mailing lists and web forum software because it had fewer spaces for a tragedy of the commons.

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