Comment by neckardt

Congratulations, you can configure your own mail server. You're already one in a million. Out of that group, maybe one in a hundred can do it nearly as securely as one of the big services. This is the reason why people use the big centralised services, and also the reason smaller ones don't survive: email is ridiculously over-complicated. You won't convince anyone it isn't by explaining that you managed to DIY in under a week.

Fortunately, rolling your own git isn't nearly as hard, and the percentage of people who could run a node compared to total users is larger. Hell, every person using git also has a fully-functional, secure and standard self-hosting stack already installed. Getting a GitHub-like web interface is similarly easy. This fundamentally reduces the risk of centralising, which conversely means that people don't have any qualms about using GitHub, since they can leave at any time. (Less true of issues, PRs, community, but hey.)

In either case, centralising has large benefits: one for handling complexity, one for giving you a community.

When you want decentralisation, it's because you don't want a single entity controlling what the ecosystem becomes. The circumstances where this is true are typically big utility-like things, where we care more about guaranteeing that water and electricity exist than the top end of providers' profits. Email is like this. You would never build your own power station, just like these days it would be bordering on negligent to use anything except Office365/GSuite/etc as your corporate email host. Lots of jurisdictions will create highly regulated marketplaces so you don't get Enron-California-style anti-competition. When things get that bad in Gmail-land, let us know.

[Edit: I was pretty snarky just there, but not at you! It was in general, I swear.]

I want to make that switch, but am rather intimidated by my inexperience in that domain. Are there any guides or tutorials you've used that you'd recommend?

If you are on Windows, the equivalent is smartermail. For a fee it also supports ActiveSync, which simplifies client configuration and gives pseudo-push.

Except that, 99% of the time, it does.

So you are suggesting it is a moral obligation to choose a smaller provider, even if the largest provider is better?

Centralization happens because someone ends up doing it better than everyone else, and so everyone chooses to use that provider and they become the dominant force.

I get the need for diversity, but as an individual, I am going to choose the best provider, even if they are the biggest one.

100% agreed. Maintaining a self hosted web service is a demanding task. It's not about updating to get some new features right when they're out - it's about security, and it's a real pain. The installation can get messed, so what? You're not using the tool yet. You can get a new VM. But when you're updating the machine the holds your code (heck, even GitLab.com had their issues with updates!), or the machine that holds your mail service - things get scary. Installation is not at all the issue.