Yeah that’s how I felt too. I remember being excited about g+, then I also remember aggressively turning off any association to g+ because no one was on it and it kept pushing it in my face. Come to think of it gmail was similar, invite only and that, but it wasn’t forced even at release and they made it look a lot nicer than what yahoo and hotmail had going on at the time.
If they add user-level defed, I’d be pretty on board with defederation being used for stuff like bot farms.
As it stands, with the current lack of user-level defed-- defederating is a server/user-whitelist, server-blacklist function.
Ideally I think it should be a server/user-whitelist, user-blacklist function, where a server-blacklist is reserved for botfarms/illegal content.
If anything anyone could also just pick a mail routing server, pay like $50 a year and have as many emails for as many domains as they want. I got one, I have like 8 domains pointed to it for emails. All I had to do was fill in the blanks for the DNS page for the domain (mx, and the spf+dkim) and all emails I send go to inbox like butter. Unlimited email accounts, takes 15 seconds to make, no phone no name no nothing just email+pass and it exists now.
gmail was nice for a bit, but shit man I don’t want to give my life story and phone number every time I want to make an email address.
yeah the comment per day graph is not doing too hot. Subscriber count may be rising but comment count is constantly in the valley.