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?
Well a few minutes ago you were believing that email was owned by Google, surely this is good news to you on balance, right?
Yeah I guess. But yahoo, tutanota, proton mail, hotmail, etc. all answer to a company. I was hoping for a more permanent solution which I think could either be
- Fediverse not requiring email to sign up
Or
- A community or non profit email service that is not tied to one company but owned by many.
I guess proton mail will be the next best thing but there’s the fear that they too will not remain free forever.
Don’t stress it too much. The companies have incentives to not fuck around with things too much. Especially with email. I think the biggest danger isn’t even them having your email, but the fact that many things can be connected (and suddenly disconnected) that are linked to that account. So if you use an android phone and your google account gets locked for some reason, you can be locked out of your phone, your bank (due to email), your messages, your google photos, your google drive files, your apps that you paid for, anything you logged into using your gmail account, etc. I’ve been migrating some of my stuff into different places just for that reason.
Having companies involved isn’t bad as long as there’s enough choice. There are such a huge number of email providers I think there’ll always be alternatives if one turns bad - respectfully I don’t think your fears are realistic.
Also, paying isn’t necessarily a bad thing, for example Protonmail’s paid options I think are quite reasonable for what you get and it keeps it private and ad-free, it’s a fair deal. I don’t think free providers will ever go anywhere but there is the choice.
To be honest, proton is quite expensive for what it gives. Though this might differ depending on income levels and level of comfort. But their free version is serviceable enough if your email volume isn’t that high.
