People have been bringing email up a lot, but it’s really a good example of why federated systems end up centralizing and fail to accomplish their goals. Almos

People have been bringing email up a lot, but it’s really a good example of why federated systems end up centralizing and fail to accomplish their goals. Almost nobody runs their own email server, the few that do struggle with not getting blacklisted by Google and the tiny number of other companies everyone else uses. Even the tiny number of highly technical users that persist despite that are communicating almost entirely with people on gmail anyway. This is a failure. It’s a failure for the same reasons mastodon will fail: spam is a hard problem, servers are too hard to run, centralization has UX advantages that can’t be overcome without changing underlying problems with the software stack (dependencies, general complexity, how updates are deployed across a federated network). Urbit is trying to do this, as far as I can tell nobody else is taking it seriously.