The point about email/gmail is that Google's rather declining spam processes don't keep spam out, but do make it excruciatingly difficult for a family to run th

The point about email/gmail is that Google's rather declining spam processes don't keep spam out, but do make it excruciatingly difficult for a family to run their own SMTP server and their own DNS and send mail to Google without it going into the spam folder. If I exchange 10 emails with my ex-wife who is hosted on gmail, about 50%, of the messages in a consistent thread, will be in the spam folder. If I'm dealing with some government email, I might or might not be able to send them email, it's a crap shoot. Good thing I kept my AOL.com email address which I can use as a last resort (as well as a contact info for my DNS registrars and cloud computing). If mastodon stays just a larger number of smaller players, then it is likely to be accessible to the "run my own servers" crowd; if Meta and other very large companies come in, then the economics shift and the odds are that it will become more difficult for small operators over time.