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?
Email is a federated system. You can host your own email server. Email was the fediverse before the fediverse was cool.
But there are many EEE attempts by big players.
Microsoft Exchange is not entirely compatible with normal protocols in subtle ways to provide outlook-only features which makes it very difficult for me to use my preferred email client for my work emails. So I am naturally forced to use outllook while I hate it.
Gmail can easily mark any small and private email domain as spam making. And in fact there are many stories like these, where people stopped self hosting their email server to use a bigger player (and often pay for it) so their emails are seen. If gmail was smaller, they wouldn’t have so much power as forcing most people to not host email.
So the conclusion for me is not corporate vs free/FOSS. But more about preventing having too much power in a single instance which is why it is important not to let threads federate and take >90% of the content, participants, etc…
Email is already a federated system. You can host your own email service.
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?
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.
Isn’t email an inherently federated concept? You can host your own email-server and send emails to any address, no matter who runs the servers. What exactly is the issue?
or you can get an email address for 1-2 bucks a month, just look for a provider that ticks your boxes (privacy, etc…)
eigther you pay for the product, or you are the product…
I pretty much thought federation was about trying to bring email-like qualities to other things where there was a gap being filled (and held back by) private enterprise, such as IM (Matrix, XMPP, IRC).
Email is an example of a lot things done right as far as being decentralized. Sure, there are entities within Big Tech that have been working to fuck all that up…but there is a reason email is still here.
Before I knew the word federated I always wondered why all these social media platforms don’t work like email.
Government officials use government controlled email accounts, but then use “government” twitter accounts. Never made any sense to me. 🤷
My word, yes. This.
Ever since the 90s, I’ve wondered this about IM. IRC is good for many uses, but too complicated for many, so all these private options popped up, and continue to still be with us instead of an open protocol for IM. Jabber/XMPP tried to do it. Matrix, too.
And yet, we still use all this cruft like Slack and Skype and so on.
IMHO, nearly every other type of communication should figure out how to do it like email, including IM and microblogging and Reddit-like things.
Maybe Space Karen might end up actually resulting in innovation and adoption of good tech, but just not in the way that he had planned. XD
I believe ease of use is the #1 reason people stick to non-federated networks, even the governments.
Email, I send a message directly to a person or a group. This makes the idea of a federated network a little easier to wrap your mind around. I sign up for a Google or Yahoo email service. If I’m a big nerd I set up my own and send/receive email with anyone.
Social networks, I send a message to whoever wants to listen. This is easier to understand on a non-federated network. It also doesn’t help we don’t have a Google or Yahoo microblog service. There is Mastodon and which Mastodon server do you want? This is why I’m not fundamentally opposed to Threads. I share the general concerns of it taking over and not cooperating with the spirit of federated networks, but if all there is is Mastodon people will continue to be confused.
I think one reason the [IM|microblogging|forum|other communication style] is not yet fully decentralized, but email is, is because:
- Email existed and had wide adoption before Eternal September.
- It had and has a clear business use, and being interopable with other companies’ choices of email service has clear value.
The lesson from USENET is rather instructive. Like email, it is defederated, had a standard protocol, and long predated Eternal September. Unlike email, there is no clearcut business use-case, and even though both systems suffered massive amounts of problems of spam and porn, there was no clear (financial) incentive to deal with spam on USENET, other than leaving it up to the end user to use kill files and so on.
I think IM could be solved much like email, like you say. There is obviously a good business case for it (companies spend untold amounts on things like Slack). When it comes to things that are social media-ish, I think it’s more complicated, as you point out, and probably why it remains in the state that it is.
Thanks for the insight, and appreciate new terms to search. I’ve somehow never heard of Eternal September even though I was there lol.
Sure thing!
