I’m fairly new and don’t 100% understand it yet, but instances are run on servers that require money. Are we heading towards seeing ads or subscriptions to raise funds instead of relying on donations to cover overhead?
Especially with the influx of new users. Hardware upgrades are needed.
Email has not become centralised at all. You have a clear misunderstanding of what that means in the context technological services.
A centralised service is one provided by a sole or group of providers who decide who and who cannot provide said service.
Email in no way fits that description. You can spin up your own email server tomorrow and start communicating with the world through the email protocol standards.
You can, but as I said, because you aren’t a know provider every message from your server will end up in the spam folder of everyone using Gmail.
You won’t have a functional system unless you back it with either Gmail or Outlook.
I have spun up a lot of email servers over the past few years for clients and not had the issue you speak off. Perhaps you need to look either at your implementation or maybe that you are doing it on a VPS provider with a shit record?
I have brand new domains with on-prem email servers spinning up constantly and do not have the issue you described.
If you are using hosted servers then perhaps you need to dump the host.
It’s interesting to hear your take as someone experienced, because on hobbyist forums like /r/selfhosted I used to hear the complaint above all the time. Maybe people aren’t doing things correctly. I’ve never messed with my own email server and have no dog in this fight, but I’ve definitely heard that complaint a ton.