I love email.
Email has a lot of the same problems fedi has. It’s used by some very bad people, there’s not a lot of moderators, there’s spam and bad faith servers that you need to block on the instance level, if you get kicked off a server or a server operator folds you need to migrate your address and that’s a 🐝, the protocol is also really complicated these days with many layers and spec addons, it’s difficult to find a place and crowd that’s good for you etc.
Fedi also has some of the same advantages as email: no-one owns it, it can be used for all kinds of things, it’s free etc.
Email and fedi work very similarly except fedi has more bugs.
The one biggest social difference is that fedi more readily encourages world-readable casual conversations, and that seems like a recipe for disaster. Although email does have things like public inbox, like the one we have for brev, which has some of the same issues.
So when I try to ponder how I should approach fedi, I land in wanting to think of it as a buggier version of email. Since I love email, then maybe fedi is good too. The bubble timelines have made it a lot more useful and friendly for me and made it feel a lot more like smolnet. When I try to treat the entire planet as if it were in my living room, I’m not a happy camper. But correspondence with friends? That I can get behind, and fedi has made that more accessible.