GMail dominating email is mainly bad because their level of influence allows them to do things like cripple IMAP (their broken support heavily influences how cl

GMail dominating email is mainly bad because their level of influence allows them to do things like cripple IMAP (their broken support heavily influences how clients must implement IMAP - usually wrongly on purpose) & push other major hurdles for clients like their "trusted apps" auth ux. However, all things considered, Gmail is still in a way better state than any popular social media service. I can talk to someone on gmail without having a google account. They can talk to me. I can migrate my data on and off it with relative ease. That's not possible with any major social network (gdpr has made the data out situation better but it's still inconsistent and high effort). So even if mastodon gets popular enough to become dominated by a large corp instance, the protocol still represents a massive improvement over the current twitter status quo.