although this is unlikely to substantially and directly impact us and is a more immediate concern for Mastodon and similar fediverse software, we've signed the Anti-Meta Fedi Pact as a matter of principle. that pact pledges the following:
i am an instance admin/mod on the fediverse. by signing this pact, i hereby agree to block any instances owned by meta should they pop up on the fediverse. project92 is a real and serious threat to the health and longevity of fedi and must be fought back against at every possible opportunity
the maintainer of the site is currently a little busy and seems to manually add signatures so we may not appear on there for several days but here's a quick receipt that we did indeed sign it.
I can host an email server. You can host an email server. Even if the big players choose not to accept mail from us, we can accept mail from each other.
I use sendmail notifications on every VM I host, and I use one of the "large operators" for my own email inboxes; I never have trouble getting messages from my VMs. The big players aren't blocking my little servers. Even if they did, they can only block the mailbox that they host. They don't host my VMs, and I am perfectly free to spin up my own mailbox to completely bypass their imposed limitations.
Contrast with a reddit, facebook, or twitter inboxes, which are entirely under the control of spez, zuck, and musk: they host (and thus control) both the sender and the receiver, as well as the path between them. Messages sent on their platforms are entirely at their whim.
Email is certainly an open protocol, and ActivityPub functions very similarly.
Yes, but my point was that those operators make up the vast majority of email accounts. Yes, all of your smaller servers can communicate with each other, but that doesn't matter when like 99.5% of the time, your target recipient will NOT be another small server.
Yes, email and ActivityPub are both decentralized, but that's about where the similarities end. Email, as a decentralized protocol, has been an abject failure. It is well known that big players DO actively block email from smaller servers often. Your individual experience is irrelevant. (For more details, see the thread at https://twitter.com/cfenollosa/status/1566484145446027265?lang=en)