@thegibson From what I see, the gain is structured communication. You can't "like" people's emails and have everyone see you've liked it, you can't differentiate between a Note or a Page (among other things), and lastly, email today is heavily locked down by the big companies, blacklisting people using VPS for mail servers.

If email had the same structure, there would've been no reason for ActivityPub. ActivityPub is extensible by design.