Using email is the worst experience in the world. There’s no security, no standard for quotes, no delivery guarantee, a patchwork of attachment deliverability guidelines and you have to understand things like bcc in order to not commit bizarre faux-pas all the time.

Email sucks and I can’t believe a person who wants to have a conversation about ux would seriously hold it up as a positive example.

Email literally replaced messaging held in shared files between time users of mainframes. It replaced the most centralized system imaginable which had a ux that required no additional understanding or training of a mainframe user. Twenty years after its inception, major universities still had to have special training classes to make sure students and faculty could use email.

The problem of people not joining lemmy/activitypub isn’t the ux of choosing a server. The problem is no one wants to leave reddit enough to do so. Lemmy doesn’t offer anything except possibly the same experience as being on some idealized version of reddit so why would users flock to it?

A better approach would be try to be a better platform than reddit like reddit was to digg, like digg was to slashdot etc. that’s what hexbear and beehaw do.

It’s the same thing.

Email even has its own version of federation and de federation in dkim.

The only difference is that you’re oftentimes not given access to an email address from your internet provider by default anymore so you’re not automatically joined into the system.

People balking at choosing a server are not showing you a bad user experience, they’re showing that they don’t really want to be part of a reddit alternative.

And the broader lemmy/activitypub/whatever needs to figure out if it wants to be like beehaw and hexbear and abandon the shape of reddit or if it wants to duplicate it and try to compete with reddit.