Gregory's Server@davidr @atomicpoet @mveron How could they make it hard? https://docs.joinmastodon.org/methods/accounts/#followers The API endpoint for followers is public. The API can achieve anything the front-end could, and that also means I could use third-party apps (like https://movetodon.org/) to use those functions that could've been obscured by my instance.
Outlook, Gmail and other competitors are much more than just e-mail now. There's an entire suite there, email being a miniscule part of it. Changing your email provider is relatively easy assuming you have your own domain, it's all the other stuff that is hard.
But unlike those services that are built almost entirely on private infrastructure, Mastodon is entirely the ActivityPub protocol.
@byte @atomicpoet @mveron I fave'd a post this very morning from someone who said they "finally" got IMAP working with Outlook365.
This is how these companies make money--breaking protocols just enough to keep people captured. They are *good* at it. And when someone figures out how to handle it, they break it again.