I don't know how I feel about email(xeiaso.net) |
I don't know how I feel about email(xeiaso.net) |
Some people are putting Mastodon forward as a replacement for a centralized platform, but now the network effects are working in the same direction as the complexity friction—both are pushing you towards centralized platforms and away from Mastodon and company. For most people there's no incentive to overcome the barriers because they would be the first in their social circles to attempt it, and the centralized platforms so far have had little motivation to support ActivityPub because their users don't expect to interact with that ecosystem. If Threads really does implement ActivityPub I could see that changing, but that remains to be seen.
This doesn't mean that Mastodon doesn't have a place right now—if you're looking for a community that is specifically filtered to exclude those who aren't above average in technical competency, it'll do nicely. But it cannot serve the median internet user today.
It's written to be a satire of critiques about federated social media services like Mastodon and Lemmy.
> Tags: satire email
Half the comments on long blog posts usually end up discussing the headline, or even just part of it. Combine that with the difficulty people on online forums have to recognise blatant satire and you'll end up with pages of discussion about SMTP before you know it.
I see at least four top level comments failing to see the satire or talking about email. The downvotes are pushing them down, but it shows the sarcasm warning was necessary…
When email was developed, your email address would have been comprised of the computer you used (email is quite old) and your account name on said computer. As computers proliferated, the "computer" instead becomes "institution providing you with internet access", which would be your employer or your university (if a student), or your ISP if you manage to get home internet access. The email address is thus fundamentally tied to your source of internet [1], which also made it a useful unique identifier for the Web. But the desire for stability of this across ISP changes, as well as the need for multiple email accounts for a single household (kids don't want to use their parents' email address), propels the need for webhosted email accounts, email identities not specifically tied to your source of internet. And these email providers should be seen as exceptions to the general rule that email comes from your internet provider (although they probably provide the majority of email addresses now).
So the decentralization of email doesn't really create a "what server do I choose?" question, because the server is already chosen for you. And to the extent that the question does come up (when choosing a personal, permanent email provider), the evidence from the field is that the vast, vast, vast majority of people settle down for very few providers for this question (Gmail is close to a majority of personal email accounts, if not already there). From a user's perspective, email is not decentralized, and the confusion that Mastodon's decentralization brings isn't really an issue in email.
[1] And if you look up the version of email that was actually properly designed from the ground up as email (X.400), rather than accreting over time as SMTP et al did, it's even more apparent that email addresses are intended to come from your source of internet.
This is very common among older people, for example.
I usually see these arguments from people who never had any interest in even trying Mastodon (or a related service).
In practice, there are only three large providers (Apple, Google, Microsoft, not necessarily in that order) that control whether or not your email gets delivered, so the comparison doesn't work entirely if you look at the modern web.
There also aren't that many Mastodon spam filters out there, but then again I haven't seen the same amounts of spam on there. I'm sure it'll get worse once Threads starts interacting with other servers and more people join the network, though.
Mastodon does solve the authenticity problem that SPF, DKIM, and DMARC have yet to solve in email. When you receive a message from steve@example.com, you don't need to dig through the headers to make sure it wasn't a Gmail signed envelope from some entirely different domain that happened to use the same server infrastructure like you need to with email.
Application specific passwords. If you have 2FA enabled on your Google account, you can create an app password for your account to use a client like Aerc or whatever.
https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/185833?hl=en
Note, an organization may configure policies to disable this access.
Google really prefers you'd use sms 2fa over totp.
It's probably meant ironically (I see more reasonable date formats elsewhere on the site), but Americans will truly do anything to avoid using international standards.
Mastodon is an open platform where people can post things publicly.
Email is private communication between individuals.
Petty disputes exist on Mastodon because admins can see what's being posted and talked about in other instances and so can choose to ban them just for personal spite.
How about your instance admin peeping into everyone's DMs and seeing which servers hold the most people talking against the Democratic party and then blocking all those instances?
Would you like that?
Well, that's what would need to happen with email to achieve a same 1:1 comparison
Take, for example, email delivery: if you're simply running a Tor relay (not an exit node) on the same IP address. You'll end up on a weird lists of blacklists not because there's any chance of abuse, but simply because they don't like Tor (or because they're too incompetent to distinguish between the two or too lazy to look up what those IP address lists mean).
The biggest difference between Mastodon and email is that you're less likely to interact with the petty administrators because people send fewer emails than they send toots. I promise you that free, community run email servers will be just as petty, shady, or unreliable as any hobbyist Mastodon instance.
Criticisms of mastodon/lemmy/fediverse are 100% warranted. People try it and give up because it’s a confusing mess compared to any alternative. So either the product is so complex it can’t be simplified, or the developers of the project are so ignorant to user feedback that they aren’t willing to prioritize simplifying it. Both of these do not bode well for long term success or wide adoption.
There is also this sense I get when interacting with some fediverse enthusiasts that perhaps the complexity is good because it keeps the communities small, or if you can’t figure it out you shouldn’t use it. All I have to say about that perspective is that it’s pretty damn pretentious, as well as at odds with the messaging that these are meant to be replacement services for widely adopted social networks.
It's an interesting and mostly correct article overall, but I must come to the defence of email here.
I would say this is a rather unfair characterisation of Internet mailing lists. I've been a member of dozens, if not hundreds, of mailing lists; I have never seen a member threatened with a ban, let alone being ejected. This may have been the predominant culture twenty years ago (and the archives witness that), but times have changed.
Especially the points 'there's no real way to migrate between email servers either, so whatever I choose is going to be my permanent home' and 'I can't run my own server' parts are very valid criticisms of the Email system…
What software needs that? Mail in a box seems much lower for the whole stack: https://mailinabox.email/guide.html#machine
I initially ran my own email server. Spam filtering was easy.
Then things got more complicated.
Now I only use email for corporations to send me bills.
To the person just entering the world and getting exposed to computers and the internet I can almost understand the perspective.
There are a lot of silly things that exist because of necessity and systems being built over time.
Why isn't our mail just routed to a three-word address?
Like every tax system in government and system architecture, if we knew now how it would be implemented in used, we would do things differently.
There is a loss when oral history is removed from a culture. The stories of why are gone.
There is a warning, do not move the ancient landmarks. Do not tear down an old fence. After learning this I now ask, why is it this way?
> why isn't our mail just routed to a three-word address?
If only there was something that could take words like "grdotcloud gmail com" that we could use to deliver mail!
Setting it up from scratch is extremely annoying but there are foss solutions which manages everything mentioned and more, you only need to install & add the specified DNS records. Modoboa does a great job at this: https://modoboa.org/en/
> Also apparently there's no real way to migrate between email servers either
This seems false (unless I'm misunderstanding), you can just setup a second mailserver, change DNS records and run IMAPsync to get everything transfered (backend-indepently), the only thing that would need additional consideration is passwords.
Since then, I’ve obtained my own domain name to have a ‘permanent’ (while I pay for the domain) email address.
Now I just forward these emails to my gmail account. I don’t have any hang-ups about google using my emails to train my AI overlord. Maybe the AI will recognize me like a country cousin?
As for email clients, just use whatever Netscape comes with.
Email accounts have waaaaayy more information about you than a public social media account. I can find out your private thoughts, the things you buy, who you owe money too, your social graph, tons and tons of data. I can find out way more about than from some comments on a nerd forum.
I don't see any spam in my inbox either, the little spam I do receive ends up in the spam box where it belongs.
Whatever mail setup Mailcow defaults to has worked great for me. Mailcow and mail-in-a-box have made the classic email setup very painless.
The fediverse is not a product. The fediverse is an organization of humans willing to interact together. There are dozens of softwares, documentation on how it works and how to migrate, tens of thousands of instances each with different rules. The fediverse is a universe, not a plastic-wrapped package you buy and consume. The goal is not to capture the population as fast as possible, as seems to be the only valid metric on here, because that would mean coming back to where we started and not having advanced a single step
> if you can’t figure it out you shouldn’t use it
If you don't want to take the time to understand what it is, then you maybe you shouldn't use it. It's like coming to the house of a stranger: you don't know them, you try to understand the rules, ask around, maybe remove your shoes at the door or at least make sure it's ok if you keep them. But if you expect to enter without saying a word, picking beers in the fridge and shouting at people that's just rude. The fediverse is built to prevent exactly that.
> these are meant to be replacement services for widely adopted social networks.
No, there shouldn't be a replacement for social networks, the same way the web is not a replacement for something else: the web is one application that equalizes access and publication. The fediverse is a universe for everyone to have a voice and discuss and organize. Make conversing easy by giving back control to people.
I think my main issue is that while this is great idealism, it’s fundamentally hypocritical in practice. The fediverse is not a place for everyone when the vast majority of people do not understand how or why to use it. It is not accessible across cultural barriers, and it’s not accessible to those with lower levels of technological literacy.
Bitcoin proponents play the same game about decentralization: centralized industries no longer in control, power to the people, etc. Except instead of just centralized power to a new group, whoever ended up being early adopters.
The fediverse is a small group of technologically literate folks doing the same thing, but with social networks. It’s an (intentional or otherwise) homage to the old web, before Eternal September, which I totally understand the desire for. But it claims to be a new voice of the people, when really it’s just a new platform for the voice of the few. Those fed up with the actual voice of the masses (it turns out most people don’t have much interesting to say, and probably don’t agree with you). It instead replaces the mass of voices with a smaller, pre-filtered set of voices. It is its own echo chamber.
We certainly need viable competition to the massively centralized, corporate controlled internet that we live in today. The fediverse is a good experiment, and quite likely in the right direction. But it’s activists and participants need to a reckon it’s actual nature rather than the idealist model they claim it to be. Right now there’s a whole lot of drinking of the kool aid, which will only be to its detriment long term.
If the fediverse is a universe for everyone, then it should be accessibility über alles
But contrary to what you say, there is an ever growing amount of resources and orgs that take the active role of welcoming and guiding people into the network. This is where change happens: by teaching others, by taking time with them, by showing them, opening an account for them, having a space where they can come. It takes a lot of time and it's why the growth of open networks isn't as fast, but it's ok because that's not the point. The point is to make it together. It's not a technical problem, it's a social problem, and we're going to solve it with social solutions, not more javascript.
So, yes, it is only self-learnable by an elite. But no, it doesn't mean it is only for the elite. It just means tech isn't the only way.