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I don't know how I feel about email

xeiaso.net

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Re: I don't know how I feel about email

#51

Post by CrampusDestrus »

jeroenhd wrote: post #45
CrampusDestrus wrote: post #42

Comparing Mastodon (or ActivityPub-related endeavors) to email is silly. 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 an…

Are you saying email administrators are somehow above this all? They absolutely make weird personal choices when it comes to blocking servers and users. Microsoft will purge your account if it detects what appears to be a names child. 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 c…

Email admins are not above this, but they have waaaayy less information available in order to ban stuff

Re: I don't know how I feel about email

#52

Post by FooBarWidget »

jeroenhd wrote: post #46
grrdotcloud wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twenty some years later I am still on the same domain. 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 bu…

What got so complicated? Things like reverse PTR and SPF are trivial. DKIM is a bother to set up but you do it once during an annoyed afternoon and never need to look at it again. DMARC is as easy to set up as DKIM. > 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!

Yes you do all that plus spamassasin, and then still your outgoing emails don't arrive, and your incoming emails still contain spam.

Re: I don't know how I feel about email

#53

Post by lapcat »

FooBarWidget wrote: post #50
jcranmer wrote: post #48

There's one big misconception here which really tears down the entire analogy from the beginning: you don't really choose your email server, and you were never intended to. 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…

I can't remember anybody using their ISP email since ~2000. Email tied to your source of Internet is the exception, not the rule.

> I can't remember anybody using their ISP email since ~2000.

This is very common among older people, for example.

Re: I don't know how I feel about email

#54

Post by appplication »

rakoo wrote: post #47
appplication wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I seems to be missing the mark and satirizing the users for not understanding or liking a poor user experience, when it would make more sense to satirize the platform itself for failing to appropriately consider that when given a choice, users aren’t going to choose the difficult and annoying thing, but rather the simple and understandable one. Criticisms of mastodon/lemmy/fediverse are 100% warranted. People try it…

> 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. 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…

> 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

Re: I don't know how I feel about email

#55

Post by Kye »

lapcat wrote: post #53
FooBarWidget wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't remember anybody using their ISP email since ~2000. Email tied to your source of Internet is the exception, not the rule.

> I can't remember anybody using their ISP email since ~2000. This is very common among older people, for example.

Even AOL is still around as webmail.

Re: I don't know how I feel about email

#56

Post by goranmoomin »

I get that this is a satire post on the usual criticisms of Mastodon, but honestly the points on Email is valid, and the reasons are a big point on why non-business Email usage is declining…

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…

Re: I don't know how I feel about email

#57

Post by jeroenhd »

FooBarWidget wrote: post #52
jeroenhd wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What got so complicated? Things like reverse PTR and SPF are trivial. DKIM is a bother to set up but you do it once during an annoyed afternoon and never need to look at it again. DMARC is as easy to set up as DKIM. > 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!

Yes you do all that plus spamassasin, and then still your outgoing emails don't arrive, and your incoming emails still contain spam.

That's not my experience. MS Outlook seems to have it's off days, but email usually arrives just fine. That's even on Contabo's network, which is listed on that one "your ISP doesn't do enough to stop spam" blacklist Microsoft annoyingly refers to.

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.

Re: I don't know how I feel about email

#58

Post by grrdotcloud »

jeroenhd wrote: post #46
grrdotcloud wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twenty some years later I am still on the same domain. 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 bu…

What got so complicated? Things like reverse PTR and SPF are trivial. DKIM is a bother to set up but you do it once during an annoyed afternoon and never need to look at it again. DMARC is as easy to set up as DKIM. > 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!

From my apartment with DSL it wasn't exactly easy. Those TLAs didn't exist twenty years ago.

Re: I don't know how I feel about email

#59

Post by [deleted] »

appplication wrote: post #54
rakoo wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. 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…

> 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…

[deleted]

Re: I don't know how I feel about email

#60

Post by gpvos »

> This article was posted on M07 16 2023.

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.

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