> The issue there is that in any "real" email host (ie not in your closet) you have no problem[1] emailing another host.
Spam filtering and intense host allowlists and denylists are just as bad in email. In many cases it is actually worse because the number of "real" email hosts has shrunken to a staggeringly small number (most of which are major corporations) in some situations and self-hosting can be quite fraught with hidden traps and accidental denylist penalties and an increasingly baroque maze of security standards like SPF and DKIM and… From that perspective Mastodon is currently far more open in federation than today's email.
As much as anything "email is open" and "Fediverse is subject to blocks" is a marketing problem more than anything. Email as an internet foundation tech has decades of accidental propaganda versus reality. Mastodon has a lot of loud critiques from people that either don't want it to survive or have some other political game they are playing.
> Likewise how federation works is also a bit obtuse. The speed of nodes federating to each other feels inconsistent on a UX, and imo you should basically _never_ miss pieces of a conversation. Or at least if you do, it should be very clear that there is a blocked comment, or a yet-to-be-synced comment, etc. Right not it can just look like someone is replying to themselves or etc.
This is rarely a "speed" thing and in email analogy terms much more a "BCC" problem. Your instance was not BCCed on the other content. I remember ages of email when mailing lists were far more plentiful when these sorts of "BCC issues" were quite common. If your mailing list wasn't BCCed on a reply but then the reply of the reply BCCs it, there's an obvious missing piece in the conversation.
Mastodon UX could absolutely improve, but in this case the instance generally has no idea there is a "yet-to-be-synced comment" because there isn't a "yet-to-be-synced comment", the instance never saw that comment because it wasn't BCCed on it in the first place. (Though yes, this analogy breaks down a small bit because some of the "mailing list" posts come from RSS-like feed syndication, but there also there's no easy way to "guess" what might be in a feed the instance hasn't synced.)
Also, some of these BCC issues are intentional, for the same sorts of privacy reasons BCC itself exists in email. Mastodon offers some privacy settings for how far messages travel and some users don't want to "BCC the world" with some of their posts. There's never going to be a "complete view" of many conversations because people want some privacy in their conversations and Mastodon allows that.
> As much as anything "email is open" and "Fediverse is subject to blocks" is a marketing problem more than anything. Email as an internet foundation tech has decades of accidental propaganda versus reality. Mastodon has a lot of loud critiques from people that either don't want it to survive or have some other political game they are playing.
Agree entirely. I've argued (in recent threads) that Mastodon, just like Email, is not meaningfully Federated because ignoring this problem is what caused Email to be not meaningfully Federated. "Meaningfully Federated" as in, Email encourages centralization.
Spam filtering and intense host allowlists and denylists are just as bad in email. In many cases it is actually worse because the number of "real" email hosts has shrunken to a staggeringly small number (most of which are major corporations) in some situations and self-hosting can be quite fraught with hidden traps and accidental denylist penalties and an increasingly baroque maze of security standards like SPF and DKIM and… From that perspective Mastodon is currently far more open in federation than today's email.
As much as anything "email is open" and "Fediverse is subject to blocks" is a marketing problem more than anything. Email as an internet foundation tech has decades of accidental propaganda versus reality. Mastodon has a lot of loud critiques from people that either don't want it to survive or have some other political game they are playing.
> Likewise how federation works is also a bit obtuse. The speed of nodes federating to each other feels inconsistent on a UX, and imo you should basically _never_ miss pieces of a conversation. Or at least if you do, it should be very clear that there is a blocked comment, or a yet-to-be-synced comment, etc. Right not it can just look like someone is replying to themselves or etc.
This is rarely a "speed" thing and in email analogy terms much more a "BCC" problem. Your instance was not BCCed on the other content. I remember ages of email when mailing lists were far more plentiful when these sorts of "BCC issues" were quite common. If your mailing list wasn't BCCed on a reply but then the reply of the reply BCCs it, there's an obvious missing piece in the conversation.
Mastodon UX could absolutely improve, but in this case the instance generally has no idea there is a "yet-to-be-synced comment" because there isn't a "yet-to-be-synced comment", the instance never saw that comment because it wasn't BCCed on it in the first place. (Though yes, this analogy breaks down a small bit because some of the "mailing list" posts come from RSS-like feed syndication, but there also there's no easy way to "guess" what might be in a feed the instance hasn't synced.)
Also, some of these BCC issues are intentional, for the same sorts of privacy reasons BCC itself exists in email. Mastodon offers some privacy settings for how far messages travel and some users don't want to "BCC the world" with some of their posts. There's never going to be a "complete view" of many conversations because people want some privacy in their conversations and Mastodon allows that.