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Inside continues to bet on email, the “largest social network”

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Re: Inside continues to bet on email, the “largest social network”

#141

Post by ryandrake »

ams6110 wrote: post #89
ergothus wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can also assume that copy will remain readable - standards and multiple vendors matter. I have no huge issue with moving to a more IM-based interaction as my default, but I've yet to find one that is actually compatible with them all. I need 3-5 apps to communicate to everyone right now, and in a few years some of those will be gone and new ones will be added.

This is part of why I send email in plain text. HTML is probably not going away any time soon, but plain text has been around several decades longer at least.

At least HTML can be trivially converted to text. Who wants to bet that your conversations in WhatsApp, or WeChat, or Facebook, or whatever the kids are using today, are binary blobs that require a running, proprietary "app" to view, or only available through a cloud service?

Re: Inside continues to bet on email, the “largest social network”

#142

Post by UnpossibleJim »

UnpossibleJim wrote: post #17
aidenn0 wrote: post #12

e-mail seems to be dying fast. I have several friends (all under 30) who are only reachable via facebook or SMS; e-mail is an afterthought.

Even in a professional setting?

Huh. Good to know. Thanks =).. Ok. For the record, I am not under 30 (it's probably very obvious), and I was always a dork, even when I was under 30, way long ago in the stone age before cool cars were electric with touch screens (I'm pretty jealous of that, though).

Re: Inside continues to bet on email, the “largest social network”

#143

Post by jimktrains2 »

TomMarius wrote: post #135
jimktrains2 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If my bouncer goes down, I don't have the history for the period for which it was down. Congrats on 100% uptime, but that's not the numbers one should plan by.

If the bouncer goes down and your team uses only the bouncer, someone fixes the problem before new history is made, and nothing is lost. Fixing the problem means rebooting the machine, there is absolutely nothing that can go wrong with a simple IRC bouncer.

I'm really not sure what you're talking about. I mean in general, not one very specific use case.

Re: Inside continues to bet on email, the “largest social network”

#144

Post by a3_nm »

wowtip wrote: post #114
a3_nm wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the situation is a bit different. While some companies have used XMPP for chat, I don't recall that any had advertised prominently the notion that you could use their chat system to talk to people on a different network. This was something that geeks could do (and did), but was never a selling point for the vast majority of users. Compare this to email, where every user expects their email client to be able t…

It is a sad sign of the times, you can no longer (easily) set up an email server of your own and expect emails to be delivered to everyone. Managing O365 for a few domains I quite frequently see mail from not-so-small companies with their own servers getting stuck in MS Quarantine filtering.

My email server is running on a cheap dedicated machine, with SPF and DKIM (and SSL) correctly set up, and which is only used to send my own email (no mass mailing, etc.). In many years of using this as my email system, I recall only two cases where my email was rejected: by a university, which required manual whitelisting; and by GMail once for an incomprehensible reason. Of course greylisting (delaying for a few hours the first time) is frequent, but that's fine. So I wouldn't say the picture is as grim as you suggest.

Maybe there were more cases where my mail got lost because of excessive filtering on other providers and where I didn't notice it, but there comes a point where I don't care and I can just blame the recipient if they use a provider which silently ignores some incoming mail...

Re: Inside continues to bet on email, the “largest social network”

#145

Post by alkonaut »

emilyfm wrote: post #64
pmlnr wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is only one important aspect. It's also provider-independent (as long as you own the domain, that is true) and is, by nature, decentralised. (Like really decentralised, even by redundancy provaded by MX record priority in DNS.)

Unfortunately very few people have their own domain for email (although they should!). When companies have kindly sent me their entire customer list (by using CC in place of BCC) I see there are very few domains in it outside of the major free email providers, and those that remain are mostly for their work or small business. A personal or family domain is very rare.

I have my own domain, and I really should be using me@myowndomain but I don't. I use gmail. One reason is that so many people and services already know the gmail one so it's hard to change, but the biggest reason is that I don't trust myself nor the place where I registered for my domain to actually maintain the domain name registry and email delivery for say 10 or 20 years without any maintenance. The value of these behemoth services is that they are more or less guaranteed to be more stable than anything you can configure yourself. They are too big to fail. Even just pointing my me@myowndomain to gmail doesn't help here. It just adds a new weakest link to the chain.

Re: Inside continues to bet on email, the “largest social network”

#146

Post by icebraining »

jasonmcalacanis wrote: post #23
aidenn0 wrote: post #12

e-mail seems to be dying fast. I have several friends (all under 30) who are only reachable via facebook or SMS; e-mail is an afterthought.

I hear people say this from time to time, but I think once you get to college and into the workforce you start to center your life around TXT and email. I view each email address as an LTV of $10-50 and every phone number as 2x that. Owning emails and phone numbers is the great asset any startup can have -- but so many founders miss this!

Maybe. Over the past few years, we gained a few B2B clients who actually insist on using Whatsapp over email. We've resisted it somewhat (the final confirmation must still be sent over email), but if the trend continues, I'm not sure we'll be able to.

Re: Inside continues to bet on email, the “largest social network”

#147

Post by alkonaut »

hiisukun wrote: post #84

I enjoy email, but get frustrated when conversations get long. Here is my favourite quote about email, which explains the issue lovingly: -- A: Because it reverses the logical flow of conversation. Q: Why is top posting frowned upon? A: Top-posting. Q: What is the most annoying thing on usenet and in email?

Email should not be used for group conversation, period. From one person to many is OK. Between two people is also OK (They can usually keep a conversation consistent in some way). Group discussions with multiple people over email is usless. Discourse and similar is a much better alternative to that.

Re: Inside continues to bet on email, the “largest social network”

#148

Post by pmlnr »

cyphar wrote: post #72
pmlnr wrote: post #52

"[...] People seem to hate email for the same reasons they once loved it. Email's underlying triumph, the quality that made it revolutionary, was that you could instantly deliver a written message to someone even if they weren't there to receive it. [...] Email is neutral, meaning that anyone can email anyone else with an email address. If you have a person's email address, your message will be delivered no matter wh…

> (BTW this is what decentralisation people should understand: you need to build services using common protocols, not services which can be installed; mastodon is a bad example, activityfeeds or linked data are good ones) Mastodon/GNU Social uses standardised protocols. ActivityFeeds is an attempt to unify the a different protocol as a W3 standard. With ActivityFeeds you also will need to install a service just like…

> don't need to install Mastodon yourself

My point is that if I don't want Mastodon, I still want to be able to talk to Mastodon with something else.

If this is already sorted, that's good, and in that case, sorry for lagging a bit behind.

Re: Inside continues to bet on email, the “largest social network”

#149

Post by cyphar »

pmlnr wrote: post #148
cyphar wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (BTW this is what decentralisation people should understand: you need to build services using common protocols, not services which can be installed; mastodon is a bad example, activityfeeds or linked data are good ones) Mastodon/GNU Social uses standardised protocols. ActivityFeeds is an attempt to unify the a different protocol as a W3 standard. With ActivityFeeds you also will need to install a service just like…

> don't need to install Mastodon yourself My point is that if I don't want Mastodon, I still want to be able to talk to Mastodon with something else. If this is already sorted, that's good, and in that case, sorry for lagging a bit behind.

Any GNU Social implementation (such as the one run by the FSF or anyone else) is compatible with Mastodon. They use the same protocol, and that's been the case from day 1 (Mastodon is just an implementation of that protocol). Mastodon is not really "new" at all, it's just a nicer UX than previous implementations.

For example, MediaGoblin has been planning on peering with GNU Social to allow you to share media as GNU Social statuses (and you could then share and comment on media directly rather than having to send a link to it).

Re: Inside continues to bet on email, the “largest social network”

#150

Post by marssaxman »

moreira wrote: post #26
jameslk wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised we haven't seen the mIRC's of email yet (or maybe there have but that just didn't work?). mIRC was a popular client for IRC on Windows. It extended IRC with features such as color and formatting in your messages, which was beyond the protocol. A feature like that worked just fine because the color codes were mostly invisible to those who weren't using a client that supported them. In this way, mIRC and…

That can be done easily enough with @media queries, I suppose. It's possible to send a table-less, fully responsive, modern HTML email that is invisible for less-modern clients. It doesn't require anything special and is possible today. The problem is that people who send email need it to look a certain way, and leaving older clients behind, just like you'd have done in IRC/mIRC, is not an option. So having the optio…

> The problem is that people who send email need it to look a certain way

As a person who receives email, I would really prefer the people who send email not to have this ability.

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