If the descentralization of social networks continue, we will have to prepare for the eventual rise of the instances wars, where people will start to fight about which instance is better and which one is weird to be in and so on, but that’s for the future of us all.
Were there mailserver wars?
Yes. In the mid 90’s, anyone with an AOL or Juno email address was a noob. Many people on the internet had .edu email addresses, because it was pretty hard to get internet access unless you were affiliated with a university. The rise of Hotmail and Yahoo mail ended up removing the association between email address and internet service provider, to the point where people who were using ISP-provided email addresses by the early 2000’s were seen as unsophisticated and usually older.
And now my parents won’t change ISP because they don’t want to change email addresses