“Email is the most resilient social network on the internet,” Mr. Schneider said, “and the thing that allows it to adapt is that it’s an open protocol, and people build apps on top of it, and we evolve how we use it.”

Versions of this kind of network already exist. Mastodon, a decentralized Twitter-like social network, has gotten more than a million registered users since its debut in 2016.

@wakest in a stunning turn of irony, i am out of free articles for this month. 😅

@wakest The suddenly increased coverage by the media is really something to behold.

Congratulations @Gargron

@wakest

I love the correction at the end

@wakest I remember a few years ago, there was a good article that talked about the "right to forget" across most things, such as limiting how long personal data can be stored. There was a lot of push back on it, but it was nice since people are rarely the same person they were ten years ago.

@wakest Nice! Here is a (probably stupid) question: how can you remove posts from a federated system, if you ever can ?

@wakest "An earlier version of this article misstated the number of registered users on Mastodon. It is more than a million, not more than 140,000."

wow in a paragraph specifically about federation they're still pulling number of users from just mastodon.social