I don’t think it’s the existance of big providers, as much as the general problem of spam, lemmy will likely have this too one day if it grows big, with or without big corporate backed lemmy’s. Fact is, it’s trivial to set up an e-mail server, and have it send millions of spam messages a day to thousands of addresses. You can then register dozens of domain names for a few dollars, and fill the internet with millions of spam messages.

Which is why pretty much all e-mail servers default anything that isn’t known to be throttled (IE a gmail account won’t let you just send as many messages as your bandwidth can handle). A black list whack a mole is basically an unwinnable battle on that front, all anti-spam measures kind of have to start with a “prove you aren’t a spammer then we’ll whitelist you”, rather than the opposite.

But the main point still remains, there are dozens of e-mail providers that have proven they aren’t spam, and more or less ones that meet every overall goal one might have. Ones that don’t track you or put ads (some you may have to pay for, but that’s the options). Still 100x healthier than say facebook and twitter where you consent to all their tracking and rules, or you can’t talk to their members ever.

Yeah on the whole it could be good, In the same way that it isn’t a problem that google owns the most popular e-mail service, that doesn’t hurt those on proton mail or any other mail service, and in fact offers benefits that they can just as easilly e-mail their friends using gmail from their preffered mail service. The real fear is the embrace extend extinguish. IE if meta encourages people to join their instance, then gradually makes things incompatible after major communities move to them, but they can’t prevent us from moving back just the same even if they somehow got us to jump there.

Personally my biggest distrust of nord comes from their ads. Most notably one where they anthromorphized a guys smart TV, Roomba and phone talking about him when he leaves the room, and others that basically totally misrepresent what a vpn does.

In short, your TV, Phone, etc… most likely share and compile information because of the ACCOUNTS they need to function. using a VPN will do NOTHING to stop google from knowing any android data, Your devices don’t hear eachother by listening to the network, which is almost all going to be encrypted protocols anyway, but by sharing accounts.

In short, I’ve always found nords comercials constantly misleading on what a VPN can and can’t protect you from, and to me it seems that’s largely so they can market them to people who don’t actually have any use for them, and worse doing it to make people feel like they are “protecting themselves” from something that they are just as vulnerable to with the vpn.