Not to mention, it’s really hard to pass time.

Point is, a hash isn’t a password. giving the most you don’t need tech knowledge analogy, it’s like the passwords fingerprint.

The police station may keep your daughters fingerprint so that if they find a lost child they can recognize it is your daughter beyond any doubt. Your daughters fingerprints, is like a hash, your daughter is a password.

The police should not store your daughter… that’s bad practice. The fingerprints are all they should store, and needless to say the fingerprints aren’t your daughter, just as a hash isn’t a password.

I mean short and long term there’s pros and cons to that. however there’s a reason why that started to fall appart with e-mail. In short if it gets popular, than hosting servers with no throttling or post limits means spammers are going to go crazy, and rather than play the never ending unwinnable whack a mole game as bad actors create thousands of instances a day, hosts of any instances worth targetting will have to do a “instances are assumed malicious until proven benign”, (IE a whitelist method)

I don’t think it’s the existance of big providers, as much as the general problem of spam, lemmy will likely have this too one day if it grows big, with or without big corporate backed lemmy’s. Fact is, it’s trivial to set up an e-mail server, and have it send millions of spam messages a day to thousands of addresses. You can then register dozens of domain names for a few dollars, and fill the internet with millions of spam messages.

Which is why pretty much all e-mail servers default anything that isn’t known to be throttled (IE a gmail account won’t let you just send as many messages as your bandwidth can handle). A black list whack a mole is basically an unwinnable battle on that front, all anti-spam measures kind of have to start with a “prove you aren’t a spammer then we’ll whitelist you”, rather than the opposite.

But the main point still remains, there are dozens of e-mail providers that have proven they aren’t spam, and more or less ones that meet every overall goal one might have. Ones that don’t track you or put ads (some you may have to pay for, but that’s the options). Still 100x healthier than say facebook and twitter where you consent to all their tracking and rules, or you can’t talk to their members ever.

Yeah on the whole it could be good, In the same way that it isn’t a problem that google owns the most popular e-mail service, that doesn’t hurt those on proton mail or any other mail service, and in fact offers benefits that they can just as easilly e-mail their friends using gmail from their preffered mail service. The real fear is the embrace extend extinguish. IE if meta encourages people to join their instance, then gradually makes things incompatible after major communities move to them, but they can’t prevent us from moving back just the same even if they somehow got us to jump there.

In short, simply lemmy has been slowly growing by tiny amounts for a year… but it hasn’t gotten nearly ready for major growth. Then reddit of course did the huge things causing lemmy to grow at 10x it’s normal predicted amount, and because it’s especially people from reddit, many of which don’t really understand federation yet. They assumed joining the main instance is the way to do it. (rather than understanding that almost all instances can communicate with eachother).

In short it’s a perfect storm for excessive growth on too small of a segment. on a network that wasn’t prepared for the sudden increase in demand.