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…
Outlook simply connects to exchange. You can buy and run your own exchange email server. People have done it for years.
Gmail handles the spam filtering because the protocol hasn’t changed since the 70s. It is the same protocol since then. It basically evolved to have spam lists and deliverability ratings based on necessity. Deliverability is impacted by many things including those outside of your control like your neighboring ip addresses. It’s not hard. Just super tedious.
As others have said email is already federated but like most federated things to make it not a shit hole in today’s world is a lot of work.
I don’t think that is an EEE attempt on email. What is (I think) an indirect EEE (I mean we’d be mad at them if they didn’t do it) is requiring strict adherence to DNSSEC/SPF/DKIM/DMARC. With the requirements changing very often it’s hard as a regular guy running an email server to keep your mail from ending up in spam folders on the big providers.
What I want to know though, is why does my mail from a domain with properly configured SPF/DKIM/DNSSEC and DMARC end up in spam, and so much spam not? :P
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.
Oh it totally used to be easy. You needed to know about DNS and MX records and how to configure sendmail and you were good to go (optional IMAP/POP3 retrieval too).
Now, it’s SPF, DKIM, DNSSEC (needed for strict DKIM), DMARC ensure you have good certificates for secure smtp/pop3/imap and even then if you have a funky domain (like most instances do) outlook/gmail will probably reject you into spam.
This is what I am afraid of. Because all major providers are companies in the end and they need to make a profit. So there may be a time when we really have to host our own email (not all of us can easily do)
I don’t know, maybe, I am just disillusioned in general that I am starting to look for community alternatives rather than provided by big companies. At least right now we have plan B like proton mail and the rest. But if the trend continues, the pessimist in me fears the time where everyone would have to self host email, or subscribe to a big provider and submit to their rules.
I shudder to think about the idea of emails becoming subscription services though.
The simple answer is yes.
The honest answer is at that point we may as well go back to using the postal service.
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…
It is unfortunate that we have to choose between the two. The idea of FOSS should be not paying and not being the product.
Ignoring that email is already federated. You can also setup your own lemmy/kbin instance and create your own user there without an email.
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.
NDC Oslo had a talk by Dylan Beattie abuto emails and he pretty much confirms this, EMail Vs. Capitalism
