[the_third_wave]

> I don't think people fall back to SMTP when a chat product goes away, I think they find a new centralized proprietary chat product.

...after they told their "friends" (i.e. other users of the failed app) via email about that hot new app that is totally going to be the place to be. That is what I mean with "SMTP abides", it is there and will be there while the centralised proprietary churn comes and goes. SMTP is easy to set up, compatibility is close to guaranteed - Google's attempts to turn Ee-mail into Gee-mail have failed, Microsoft never managed to extend/extinguish it - and it runs on just about every piece of hardware known to mankind. Upkeep is simple as well, the spam problem has been solved a long time ago, email generally "just works".

It can even work as a chat server by using something like Delta Chat [1] if you're turned off by the "old school" user agents.

[1] https://delta.chat/en/

[sanderjd]

> ...after they told their "friends" (i.e. other users of the failed app) via email about that hot new app that is totally going to be the place to be.

There may have been a time when people spread the "hot new app" via email, but it ended decades ago at the latest, when Facebook came out. But I dunno, even before that, I heard about this kind of thing on AIM or one of the many other ones that already existed at that time.

But you don't have to convince me that email is great! Or that federation in general is architecturally satisfying. I'm right there with you and most other tech enthusiast.

But that's all beside the point being made here. The point is that federation is not why email was successful, or why it persists. It was just an implementation detail of a capability that was fundamentally novel to most people when they first came across it.

But that novelty is not the case for "Twitter - but decentralized!" or "Goodreads - but decentralized!".

[the_third_wave]

> But that's all beside the point being made here. The point is that federation is not why email was successful, or why it persists. It was just an implementation detail of a capability that was fundamentally novel to most people when they first came across it.

Nope, hard disagree there. If the mail-related protocols had not been federated - i.e. had email relied on a single-source centralised server - it would not even have survived into the 90's. It would have come up against a host of commercial competitors and eventually would have succumbed to some "Microsoft Network"-like thing which would have come pre-installed on Windows 95. Only Greybeards would use email, the latte sipping set would use Apple Mail, most of the rest would use whatever Microsoft presented them with. That was the original intent of the Microsoft Network as described in the first (hardcover) edition of Gates' book "The Road Ahead" [1] in which he envisaged a future where the internet gave way to the "Information Superhighway" based around proprietary technologies.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Ahead_%28Gates_book%2...