It makes a difference if you signed up for the only instance early on, and now everyone assumes you’re a tankie.

You’d get an email address from your ISP. Early on you’d just dial the ISP, send/receive email, and then automatically hang up. College freshmen were assigned a school email address.

Eventually, “web mail” became popular because you could log in from any computer, like at the library.

By the time email became unavoidable, everyone had already been assigned at least one email address. It was seen as a major feature of the internet itself.

IMHO there’s still hope in p2p mesh networking. It can’t support high-bandwidth applications, but all the absolutely critical correspondence would work.