Please rewrite this or at least add a tl;dr and change the thread title to something more descriptive. I’m sure you have a great idea somewhere in there but I’ve had to stop reading after a couple of paragraphs that just sounded preachy and got nowhere.

Then please update your category name to reflect that. Right now it says “Self-Hosting” which to the majority of readers means hosting it yourself, whatever the reason may be: privacy, configurability or just being safe from future enshittification.

As far as I know most Lemmy instances leverages paid-for or freemium services to have their instances work easily/properly

Yes but you can’t compare a whole lemmy instance to an account on an email server that you share with others. The fair comparison would be hosting a lemmy instance to hosting your own email server and creating an account on Proton Mail to creating an account (or a community) on lemmy.world.

This looks at how technically easy it is to run your own backend (e.g., email server, Mastodon server)

Edit: also the description text “This looks at how technically easy it is to run your own backend (e.g., email server, Mastodon server)”. Relying on Proton Mail or similar free services is not running your own backend.

Here I’m a bit in two minds, sure it’s difficult to SELF host email, but in practice it isn’t because there are hundreds (Thousands?) of hosting options to choose from where you can choose your own domain etc. for the low price of basically-free

I would prefer to limit this to actually hosting it on a machine you control. We don’t consider redirecting a custom domain to a subreddit “self-hosting”, do we? Yes, there are many email providers out there but that’s more like existing lemmy or mastodon instances and not like hosting your own where you have full control over your data.

Why are we using a random repo created a few hours ago by a random github user as a reference ?

They aren’t. That’s the repo that has the latest version of the survey. The actual references are one section up.

Having set up a couple of mail servers myself, I wouldn’t call it easy. Most solutions boil down to a tangled web of dovecot, postfix, ldap and amavis. There are preconfigured docker containers which make setup easier than a couple of years ago but if your use case is even just slightly different than the maintainers’, you’ll have to dive deep into a few dozen different config files. And of course, you’ll have to find out how to configure SPF, DKIM and DMARC to have even a remote chance of your mails getting through to the big providers. I’d probably give email somewhere in the range of 8-12 points in that category.

Other than that, great summary!