You are insanely naive for saying this. If you’d used non-corporate email servers, like the much smaller email providers out there (which are basically extinct at this point) you’d know just how wrong this actually is. Most smaller email providers out there are blocked or limited by the big ones and the ones that are blocked your mail will never reach the inboxes of people on the big servers, not even the spam folders on those servers. They won’t bounce it back to you either, so it’ll just go into the void.

Most email these days is used primarily by the all mighty trinity: Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo, and a Few on Hotmail and AOL and while there are a few smaller companies out there like Proton, when it comes to something that isn’t a company or is self-hosted you can expect a lot of problems with domains being blacklisted, IPs being blacklisted, or both. And it’s actually much worse than defederation.

I’ve been using a self-administered mail server (running on a root server at a major hosting provider) as my main email provider for well over a decade. I think I’ve encountered one website where that actually led to issues. Heck, the server once got on Spamhaus’s bad side for a week and once we were off the list everything was back to normal.

Self-hosted mail works very well one you’ve jumped through all of the appropriate hoops (DKIM, SPF, etc.). Sure, running a mail server out of your bedroom probably won’t work very well but if you’re with any kind of reputable hosting provider you should be fine.

You’re beginning to realize why the decision to limit spam and illegal shit was chosen over catering to the people who want the whole federated world instead of what they’re allowed access to. Ultimately it is better for everyone if the depraved shit and spam gets blocked, than it is for the people who want the whole world to have their way. If you want the world, go to Nostr, you’ll learn why most people do not want the world.

The problem is that defederation leads to confusing situations. Being told about a response to your post/comment/toot and then finding nothing when you look is bad UX. Better UX would be a notice that what you’re looking for comes from a defederated instance and can’t be viewed – but that’s obviously impossible because your instance doesn’t even know anything is there.

Not wanting all the content on your instance is perfectly reasonable. But the way defederation works exposes details of the underlying technology to the user in a way many users don’t want to have to deal with, serving as an impediment to growing the fediverse.

It’s not easy to keep unwanted stuff off your instance while also being user-friendly about it. That’s why I called it tricky.