What’s the fediverse’s answer to email? And everything else we use?
What’s the fediverse’s answer to email? And everything else we use?
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?
You're viewing a single thread.
Before I knew the word federated I always wondered why all these social media platforms don't work like email.
Government officials use government controlled email accounts, but then use "government" twitter accounts. Never made any sense to me. 🤷
My word, yes. This.
Ever since the 90s, I've wondered this about IM. IRC is good for many uses, but too complicated for many, so all these private options popped up, and continue to still be with us instead of an open protocol for IM. Jabber/XMPP tried to do it. Matrix, too.
And yet, we still use all this cruft like Slack and Skype and so on.
IMHO, nearly every other type of communication should figure out how to do it like email, including IM and microblogging and Reddit-like things.
Maybe Space Karen might end up actually resulting in innovation and adoption of good tech, but just not in the way that he had planned. XD
I believe ease of use is the #1 reason people stick to non-federated networks, even the governments.
Email, I send a message directly to a person or a group. This makes the idea of a federated network a little easier to wrap your mind around. I sign up for a Google or Yahoo email service. If I'm a big nerd I set up my own and send/receive email with anyone.
Social networks, I send a message to whoever wants to listen. This is easier to understand on a non-federated network. It also doesn't help we don't have a Google or Yahoo microblog service. There is Mastodon and which Mastodon server do you want? This is why I'm not fundamentally opposed to Threads. I share the general concerns of it taking over and not cooperating with the spirit of federated networks, but if all there is is Mastodon people will continue to be confused.
I think one reason the [IM|microblogging|forum|other communication style] is not yet fully decentralized, but email is, is because:
- Email existed and had wide adoption before Eternal September.
- It had and has a clear business use, and being interopable with other companies' choices of email service has clear value.
The lesson from USENET is rather instructive. Like email, it is defederated, had a standard protocol, and long predated Eternal September. Unlike email, there is no clearcut business use-case, and even though both systems suffered massive amounts of problems of spam and porn, there was no clear (financial) incentive to deal with spam on USENET, other than leaving it up to the end user to use kill files and so on.
I think IM could be solved much like email, like you say. There is obviously a good business case for it (companies spend untold amounts on things like Slack). When it comes to things that are social media-ish, I think it's more complicated, as you point out, and probably why it remains in the state that it is.
Thanks for the insight, and appreciate new terms to search. I've somehow never heard of Eternal September even though I was there lol.
Sure thing!