Thanks for the clarification. I'm not terribly educated on the state of Mastodon/similar federated social media. Also interesting that you brought up Gmail/em

Thanks for the clarification. I'm not terribly educated on the state of Mastodon/similar federated social media. Also interesting that you brought up Gmail/email. I've thought for a while (admittedly as someone far more on the "user" side than the "developer" one) about how email is an example of how things might work better. For as much as Gmail and a few others have captured the vast majority of the average userbase for personal email, it's still reasonably easy to choose a different provider (and can even roll your own if you really thought it worthwhile). Switching email providers doesn't stop me from emailing people who use Hotmail or Gmail (ignoring for a minute any issues of overzealous filtering of uncommon mail servers). The individual services can implement their various extra features like spam blocking, auto sorting, etc. but for the most part, the common protocol means that an email from me@me.server can still be sent to a list of addresses at gmail.com, aol.com, hotmail.com, etc. If I want to send a message to people on Facebook, I need an active "valid" Facebook account that can be tied to their social graph.