While selfhosting email in the low-level sense of your own VPS and installing your own mail server software is frustrating today, I find this is relatively rare. More common (besides personal Fastmail/Hotmail/Gmail) is to own your own domain but pay a webhost. E.g. Fastmail or Google Workspace with custom domain, or a webhost like Hover, Gandi, Squarespace, GoDaddy, etc.
This benefits from a larger-scale spam filter, whilst also having complete autonomy over who uses it and what they use it for, plus the ability to transparently move providers if you wish, ... (read more)
I dunno about the e-mail/web hosting analogy, at least for the purposes of thinking about possible anti-spam approaches. As I understand it, the current state of Mastodon hosting is much more like the WordPress hosting example than the e-mail hosting example, in that each customer gets their own isolated instance of the software for their domain. I think a lot of the ability to achieve larger scale spam filters and etc on email hosts comes from the fact that the actual infrastructure is shared. E.g. my impression has generally been that separate Akismet-style anti-spam services has been more successful in the WordPress context than hosting-linked solutions, and that hosting-linked solutions are generally similarly implemented as plugins anyway rather than being built into the infrastructure in some deeper way. (But it’s entirely possible that I’m behind the times on that front?) In that case, there’s nothing special about the hosting provider being the same that enables anti-spam — it’s all about creating coordination systems that are trusted by many instances and thus re-create centralized decision-making for the spam-specific slice of the content moderation problem.
While selfhosting email in the low-level sense of your own VPS and installing your own mail server software is frustrating today, I find this is relatively rare. More common (besides personal Fastmail/Hotmail/Gmail) is to own your own domain but pay a webhost. E.g. Fastmail or Google Workspace with custom domain, or a webhost like Hover, Gandi, Squarespace, GoDaddy, etc.
This benefits from a larger-scale spam filter, whilst also having complete autonomy over who uses it and what they use it for, plus the ability to transparently move providers if you wish, ... (read more)