A friend has just (2025-02-06) started up a little newsletter thing for sharing their thoughts with their friends, which I think is a fun idea. At first I thought it would feel too formal, and I wasn’t sure how it’d feel responding to an email in an informal context - pretty much every email I send is in a formal capacity. But actually it was pretty nice, nowadays we’re all very used to sending short instant messages, but that comes with a sort of pressure to keep a conversation going. I like not having that over email.
While I was sending that email I realised how open the email ecosystem is. I was writing up an email in an open source email client (Thunderbird) and sending it via my own mailserver, but that would have no issues talking to Gmail’s proprietary system, in fact it couldn’t care less who runs the destination mailserver. It is completely irrelevant what system the recipient is using and I quite like that. Obviously there’s still many issues with the email ecosystem regarding increasing centralization, but far less than alternate methods!