But in practice doesn't nearly everyone use Gmail (50%), Yahoo (20%), or Outlook (15%)? I could set up email on my domain but it's easier to just forward to Gmail.
Pardon my rudeness here, but personally: popularity metrics count for jack and shit in my view. I give not a fuck that one of the top #3 protocols of use on the net has a highly predominant mode/client that it's used in.
I'd much rather evaluate by how open & extensible a protocol is, how much innovation is possible. Even if it's 0.000001% of internet users who have tried https://delta.chat/ , so long as they are not hindered, I think it speaks enormously well to the innovation/frontiers-ing/diversity potential of email. We don't need diverse ecosystems: we need technical ecosystems which are potentially diverse, which could be innovated upon. Email continues to constitute a protocol that is nearly too simple to fuck up, a protocol that can be put to many, flexible, varied uses, far beyond it's original idea & conception, in a way that the big giants can hardly stop or prevent us from enjoying.
Oh sure, we might invent new systems that don't run at full potential while interoperating with the big giants, but innovation can happily continue on & emerge at the edges, and perhaps eventually popular demand will insist the giants do change.
Again, a crude return to rudeness, but evaluating technology by it's adoption metrics is a horrible, cruel, & senseless way to evaluate things. If we did want to come down on email, I'd say that specifically the highly automated, unfixable, unresponsive non-delivery shit-show (doesn't even show up in spam) situation that is fairly often encountered by host-it-ourselvers is the one truly damnable twist-of-the-knife the giants (Google in specific, you evil cruel heartless piece of shit fuckers) puts upon the world, that obstructs healthy growth of email.
