Recently, I’ve been learning more about this subject. Today I came across the Decentralization Scoring System and it slapped me across the face.
Recently, I’ve been learning more about this subject. Today I came across the Decentralization Scoring System and it slapped me across the face.
It’s nice that it can, but the point of this list is is that what actually happens for the majority of people?
And from my experience, the answer is no, the vast majority of people use Microsoft or Google.
This claim is “Top Provider User Share: Google ≈ 17% → Score: 27/30”
Where does this number come from? Gmail alone claims 1.5 billion active users. Outlook.com has 500 million. But then you have to start adding up all the email users worldwide that are using services hosted by Microsoft (all the Exchange business customers), and the google customers as well (that may or may not be included in the Gmail figures). Then there are all the ISP email addresses that use these services as the provider.
I find it hard to believe that email is as decentralised as claimed here, and I’m really keen to see more data on how it was calculated.
The reason I find it so hard to believe is that when Microsoft fucks up (and given time they always do), a significant portion of the business customers I deal with get affected.
i personally know dozens of people self hosting email. tens of thousands of businesses have been hosting their own email for decades. i dont think you can take self-hosting away from email by pointing out the billion users are 17% on google (or whatever).
im not disagreeing with you that the big guys have big market share, but email is vast and ubiquitously self hosted.
I just really want to see where the numbers come from.
You know people self hosting email, I know people self hosting email. But that is certainly not the case for the vast, vast majority of individuals. For businesses, I have seen Exchange take over what used to be smaller hosts, and Google has broken into the small/medium business world as well. I have searched and searched and found nothing, but I don’t see why it should be so hard to do. Obtain a list of email addresses from some data breach (I dunno how but I’m sure security researchers do it all the time) then check their DNS to see what proportion point at big tech. My gut feel is that it’s a large proportion, but maybe that’s just the corner I work in.