[anderspitman]

> email is great, because everyone has an email address

I've been thinking lately that the ability to send messages is perhaps the less interesting role of email. The real value comes from providing globally unique, federated identities. It's not perfect but it's pretty dang good.

If for no other reason, this is why Slack or any other closed system will never supplant email. Even the biggest walled gardens like GOOG and FB bow to the power of email identities in the end, as the preferred (maybe even only) way to recover an account.

[crowdhailer]

Not setting up another walled garden is really important to us. Otherwise we just end up with the situation of another competing platform, as is well explained in this xkcd comic. https://xkcd.com/927/

We hope people will like being able to keep using their email address but get more features they are used to in other more modern platforms.