The talk about “enshittification” made me think of the very email we use for the instances we signed up and instantly, it paints a grim picture. One of my account used gmail to sign up. Some proton mail. It reminds me that these too are companies beholden to their shareholders.

Is there a fediverse answer to email? Like what mastodon is to twitter and lemmy is for reddit?

If not, maybe the fediverse can think about allowing email-less sign-ups?

As an addendum, what about the popular tools we use in our daily lives? The calendar, note tools, etc all are products of companies driven to maximize profits.

There’s a talk in the technology sub about how GitHub was acquired by microsoft and I’m willing to bet that it’s not the only popular tool that was or will be endangered of disappearing or turning worse in the name of profit.

Is there a community movement that can somehow mitigate this? Or is there really no choice for us? Is there a complete list of FOSS somewhere that are at par or at least only mildly worse than the popular mainstream ones?

  • Frost Wolf@lemmy.worldOP
    0·
    1 year ago

    I actually didn’t know that. So in the off chance that gmail fails or if it becomes too unbearable to use, the solution is to buy a domain and host your own email?

    • probablyaCat@kbin.social
      1·
      1 year ago

      Always has been. Heh. Actually hosting your own email server is a pain in the ass. It is absolutely possible and back when I first started using linux I think it was automatically installed (sendmail – security nightmare, that thing) for a lot of distros. But there are some issues with self-hosted email getting flagged as spam, because some of the big servers like gmail use a whitelist to help fight spam. They basically expect you to be using a server hosted by a big company. And it isn’t just one type of server, last time I looked into it. You have your inbound which can be multiple types but I believe imap is still the most popular, because it has instant update features for your client. Then you got your outbound smtp server. And keeping these things secure it kind of a big thing. I changed careers so haven’t worked in the sysadmin area for a long time, but I do believe it is still an absolute effort to keeping all of this running, not being flagged as spam, keeping it secure, etc. But it is absolutely possible. I think I’ll go read up on it now, because you made me curious.

      edit: I forgot. You also have to set up your own spam filter. Which, at least in the past, was also a daunting effort.

      edit 2: Yeah reading this makes it seem like it is still a bit of a bitch to do. Especially if you click that blacklist link. But definitely doable.