Over 20 years ago I was building social media messaging systems with an e-mail MTA.

e-mail MTA’s send messages back to senders that their messages never got delivered. And Lemmy to Lemmy does no such thing. If you send a reply to someone, no “bounce” message comes if delivery fails.

It’s sad to me to think users are there replying to each other like two ships passing in the night, no idea that the person even responded.

The queue not being saved on server shutdown and just tossing out undelivered messages to peers is something I never imagined. Again, e-mail systems in 1993 didn’t just throw out delivery retry queues on a server reboot.