[fattire]

Strange that you use a still-popular, decentralized, open-standard global service with a myriad of paid and free providers, for which there exists dozens of open-source clients and servers across the planet, all of which integrate with each other... as a model for why Mastodon won't work.

Why do you say "gmail won"? Did gmail switch to a proprietary, closed protocol? Did they lose compatibility with even the smallest, independent email servers? (That was rhetorical-- provided those smaller servers adopt appropriate open, non-proprietary anti-spam measures (DMARC, SPF, DKIM, etc), they work fine.)

Meanwhile, no one uses AOL's old proprietary mail system, if it exists any more.