[vertis]

Where it started VS where it ended though. You're looking at the end of the journey not the start of it. It was completely possible to run your own email server 20-25 years ago and diminished after that slowly with the advent of Hotmail/Gmail.

Similarly IRC was run for the longest time by federated servers from peoples basements. It only really started to diminish at all with the advent of Slack.

[phendrenad2]

So I don't get it, are we celebrating the inevitable rise of a cabal of paid mastodon providers, paralleling gmail/outlook/etc.?