Incredible to think about that we got it right the first time (with email) and still had to spend the last 20 years complaining about centralized social networks.
this post was submitted on 24 Mar 2025
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The thing about email is that the software is proprietary. Each of these providers has their own implementation of the interface, features, and integration with their tools (Google drive, photos, etc).
As long as lemmy servers run lemmy software, this won't happen, or at least won't be an issue as you can move to another server and not have to change your usage habits.
However if some server owners decide to fork Lemmy and develop their proprietary server, overhaul the UI, add features and attract users, it will start to become a problem.
Email had standardized protocols and clients for 50 years, and still does.
Most people just use the web interface
Maybe you do.
They didn't use to, anyway.
But also what you're describing is a solved problem and you'd think it'd be nice for you to learn that.
email is a standard protocol. You can run your own server using FOSS software in 5 minutes if you start now. One of the biggest problems is that you will have a hard time "federating" to gmail and others due to the spam problematic, but that is something that we will see with Lemmy, too. Currently I can spin up my own server and start pushing shit to lemmy.world and other bigger instances, but I feel that this will change with the coming spam waves
Lemmy's AGPL license doesnt allow forking the code into a proprietary server. All changes need to be open source as well, otherwise the operator can get sued. So a proprietary Lemmy software would have to be developed from scratch which would take a long time.
Lemmy uses activityPub, and open protocol for social networking.
Piefed and mbin are both open source, and interoperate with lemmy.