Modern email can be built from borrowed parts

I've ... seen a lot of poorly-considered proposals to fix it.

The fact that email has one hell of a lot of lock-in does not mean that it's not-broken. Just that it happens to be in one hell of a local optimum from which reaching any preferable state has a lot of hill-climbing to do.

Much in the way that evolution is not teleological, and cannot identify some desired state it wishes to evolve toward, but must proceed, by stepwise incremental increases in fitness to another state, so it is with protocols and standards.

That's not to say that SMTP + fiddly bits doesn't solve some problems, occasionally elegantly. But the leap from there to "it's not as broken" is ... rather large.

I've read TFA and am going through comments to this thread. There are some ideas I like, some I question. I'd suggest that this proposal seems better though through than many others I've seen.

And I see a few ideas that might be worth picking up from this proposal.

Voice and text comms ... have much in common.

Exactly, which is why attaching large UI shifts to that involuntary gesture makes the experience feel very unpredictable

> activating your browser's reading mode

Reading mode is a hack that's only needed because sites aren't already readable. You shouldn't have to activate it to be able to read the content.

In addition, it doesn't always work well if the website didn't test it. On your website, for example, it removes all images from the text.

> Having to click or tap a button requires the user to stop, evaluate whether the title interests them

Purposefully doing things in a way that doesn't let the user decide if they want it is called a dark pattern. Its not far from those checkboxes that try to trick you into accepting marketing newsletters. "We can't give users an option to think if they want our emails! If they don't, why don't they just use their email's spam filtering?"

You may not see it like that yourself, but huge links to your CV, talks and courses are exactly that - an ad that covers half the screen.

You have multiple people telling you the experience is bad, and you asked for why, but when people give you the explanation you argue back. That's fine of course, it's your own site and you can do whatever you like with it without trying to suit anyone. But that doesn't make the reader experience less bad.

First off, these systems always require indefinitely-lived secrets. To rotate keys (or the whole cryptosystem—think future possible quantum computers) is to change identity. Therefore, to change keys is to break the previous identity. Anything that requires users to think about long-term secrets is user hostile and leads to a fragile system.

Second, the economics of pubkey-as-address are untenable. Can you imagine publishing .onion addresses on billboards and business cards, let alone sharing them verbally? Absolutely not.

Unless there’s something I’m missing (please do say), these problems are intractable when you’re dealing with cryptosystem-based identity.

In the end, identity and naming and fundamentally human concerns. If you try to kludge around this with purely technical solutions, all you’ll end up with is a system that doesn’t adequately reflect what identity means to people. Good systems support this (DNS, email); bad systems fight this (cryptocurrency, nostr).