I’ve seen comparisons between the fediverse and email a few times online. So I think I’d like to point out that the analogy doesn’t actually fit that much.

The comparison only fits if you’re looking at the theory behind the Fediverse but, in practice, it isn’t similar to it at all.

Email as a protocol is pretty versatile and easy to use. Additionally, the email experience barely changes from client to client.
However, most Fediverse services are super narrow in what they can or can’t do…most of them are a pain to install for the average user^A)…and the experience can differ quite significantly from service to service.

Now…Mastodon, Pleroma, Akkoma, Misskey and GNU Social are all clones of Twitter and are thus extremely similar to each-other…but they aren’t exactly the same. This means that the experience differs slightly from service to service, which can be a bit of a pain when you actually get down to federating. I remember when I was playing around with the Fediverse that inter-service communication was painfully limited.^B)

The Fediverse itself isn’t like email, though you can make the argument that each individual component of it is. So Mastodon is email within itself, but not when you consider the other Twitter clones. Even then I think that email is far more elegant in how it manifests than Mastodon is.