maybe sending dms across the fediverse

It’s reliable, it’s simple, it’s free, and virtually everyone who uses the internet has one. Email won’t be replaced for a LONG time.

To be fair, if it is "free" you are probably paying your mail provider with your data.
- I assume he meant free like speech, not free like beer.
  There are no gatekeepers to email, anyone can get a domain and their own server.
- My mail server is in the cabinet above my desk.
  I guess you're right - my mail provider does have all my data - but my mail provider is Me!
- Or your ISP just provides you with one when you sign up.
- Not necessarily. My university provides a mail box for every student and their privacy policy is quite transparent and honest. The only limitations are related to the rate you can send emails, to prevent spam.
I wouldn't call it reliable at all but it works good enough. All the other points are so big that they make up the flaws more than once.
- Finally someone who understands email is a best effort model.
There’s kinda no replacement
I think WhatsApp has done it already in places like India

It's why SMS still exists too. It's from an era where everyone just used open standards instead of trying to create their own thing for money. Big tech conglomerates like we have now didn't exist. The state of the tech industry and it's proprietary standards is absolutely fucked.

Google is trying to kill SMS. My new android by default has sms disabled, defaulting to RCS with "try sending sms instead if rcs fails to send" option being off by default, which makes no sense from user perspective
- RCS is actually a huge improvement over SMS, as it is fully encrypted. One of the few times I've ever approved of something Google did...
It’s from an era where everyone just used open standards instead of trying to create their own thing for money.
SMS is literally from a time when every mobile phone manufacturer had their own charger plug. And some tried pushing proprietary headphone jacks.
Vendors LOVE vendor lock-in.
- Yeah that's because vendor lockin for hardware had already started. It's kind of a miracle we got everyone to agree to USB. Look at cars, same thing. Everyone agreed to the same gas pump, but it's been decades and we can't agree on a standard for electric car chargers. That's what happens when industries mature under capitalism
SMS was never intended to be available to end users. It was built as a side channel to help field techs with diagnostics. When consumer handsets started to add features, it was co-opted to provide what we know it as today.
- That explains why way back when I tried to read the GSM (1.x) specification out of curiosity, it turned out SMS were going via a "control channel".
  Always wondered why the data for those was going via a control channel rather than some kind of data channel.
Rather than build for humanity they build for the demon capital.

Thousands of years after humanity has destroyed itself with nuclear weapons...

As the sun peeks through the gray clouds and lights up a solar panel...

A long-forgotten server hums to life...

And sends an email...

"Attention Required: Your Order is Delayed"

We've been trying to reach you about your car insurance
- See my h0t n4ked body here ---->
  getallmylinkscom/usr/urieoop0oooojwhwhfb

Sidenote: Remember when having an email address was enough, you didn't have to have a fucking phone number as well? Stop trying to de-anonymize the internet, you're making more problems than you're solving

They're not trying to solve any problem beyond their own, potential resistance to false authority.
or at least fill out the online forms for us
why put it on my web browser since they have us all pretty pretty pretty pegged my friend
They will never willingly do it. Email marketing works very well compared to the money and effort companies put into it, and so does SMS. They will use every trick they can to get you to signup for one or both while avoiding being labeled an illegal spammer.

It’s because it isn’t a silo?

Discord, Slack and a bajillion similar apps do not meld with other apps. Email just happened to hit critical mass before “let’s try to get a monopoly” became the slogan of all tech, and collectively Big Tech is too stupid/hostile to replace it with some cooperative protocol.

iMessage is another pure example of this.

There are tons of open messaging protocols that have been replaced by closed ones. For instance, Discord shouldn't be a thing since IRC exists, but Discord exists and is very successful.
For some reason, likely tied to how it is used, email survived as an open protocol.
- For instance, Discord shouldn't be a thing since IRC exists, but Discord exists and is very successful.
  IRC lacks a massive amount of features that discord users typically want. Screensharing, VCs with group and camera support, built-in history (don't need to use a bouncer like on IRC), built-in online GIF searcher and sender with one click, huge community of bots that use discord's API to do anything from games to moderation.
  It isn't even close.
- Discord (to me) has better UX than any IRC I’ve ever experienced.
  Email, on the other hand, is total baloney if it’s not interoperable. It’s why SMS/MMS is like a zombie that just won’t die, and telecoms are more cooperative than most of Big Tech.
- Yeah, it's the widespread adoption/necessity that made email what it is. Discord was able to largely replace IRC because not a lot of people were using IRC. Everybody has an email account though-- you need one to order a pizza ffs

Mail has the big advantage of being totally cross platform. And it works, basically everywhere.

All the application protocols were supposed to be cross-platform! It’s something the corporatisation of the net undermined to an extent
- Have to put every damn thing over port 80 (well, 443 now). HTTP(S) was never meant to do this shit.

It's an ongoing debate in one of the projects I work with if we should move to a more forge oriented development process. For all it's faults email does provide a good record of discussion as well as evidence of review.

I've not heard of this before, and a search finds a lot about Minecraft?
- Forge is a newish term for systems like github, gitlab, forgejo, gitea, etc that provide source control, project management, issues, and discussion features for projects.
The project management capabilities of GitLab are pretty nice, for what my opinion is worth.
Then Sourcehut is built around email, so that might be a good middle ground.
- We use GitLab for hosting and CI as well as the issue tracker. Just the patch workflow goes over email although we have considered just maintainers submitting pull requests once the review and tags have been collected on list.
  A lot of the more senior maintainers find the process of patch review in the webui suboptimal compared to email.

Reality is everyone has an email, and everyone will keep having an email. My 10 year old has an email so they could sign up to epic and steam. You basically need it to use the internet at all. So of course it will survive.

Outside of business though, when was the last time you sent an email to someone you know?

My mother uses email for nearly everything. I'm 31 now, but in high school she'd email me from the basement that dinner is ready.
Just last month I received this... we chat on WhatsApp and phone calls regularly as well.
- That's cute. She treats it like writing letters or maybe postcards given the length of the message.
My ex emailed me from a new account when he thought I'd blocked him everywhere else. I hadn't, but I did after that!
I forwarded tickets to my wife. But for "normal" communication I emailed the city about a citation they gave me for my yard.
Work Accountant Lawyer Contractor Community org
Yeah basically just for transactions, management

I guess that's why someone decided to build a chat app on the email protocol and infrastructure.

https://delta.chat/en/

I love that this exists but never have used it.
Several people have tried to do this.
- Delta was first one I have heard of, but when you think about it, it would be surprising if it was the first one when email over network has existed over 50 years. What other ones are there?

I hope the Fediverse will prove similarly resilient.

I still have a weird email friend who refuses to chat over any apps and I totally can respect that. :)

cool of you to keep in contact with them :) i have always wanted to do this but i know it would isolate me and inconvenience others just to communicate with me

I work in B2B IT support, and email is designed to be very async, and for the most part it still is. What I can say with certainty is that business folks expect email to be instant like synchronous platforms are... It's not, it never will be... It's gotten about as close as it can be, but it is not, and will never be, instant delivery, no matter how much they want it to be.

check out deltachat! it's still email, yea, but it feels instantaneous
- No thanks. I want email to be email. If I want to chat, I'll use another application and protocol.

Matrix, IRC, XMPP

Also Email is useful and you probably shouldn't waste your time consuming info from people who think otherwise.

xmpp is underrated

IRC and forums as well to a lesser extent.

Much much lesser. IRC has basically died to successors. Everybody still uses email sometimes.
- Forums are still banging around however. Lots of places still use them, and thank god for that.
- IRC is mainly a thing for hardcore 2000s re-livers and lobste.rs users nowadays lol
- IRC is still a pretty strong backbone for Twitch chat. At least it was a couple of years ago.
- Everyone has to provide an email to make an account somewhere, if they don't do the whole integration with Google/Facebook/etc

You can do it from a terminal. Us Linux kids will never let it die.

yeah, aerc and neomutt are two decent options
- telnet email_server_ip_addr 25

this is your reminder to set up OpenPGP. encrypt your email.

Yeah and I'll use it with maybe one other of my tech nerd friends
- Delta Chat is basically works on PGP emails.

IMAP is useful. POP can crawl back to the bowels of hell from whence it came.

JMAP is apparently the shiny new thing trying to replace IMAP.
- Neat! I just did a quick read about it. JSON over HTTP would offer a lot of new features, most notably not requiring a persistent connection in the transport layer like IMAP in TCP. I’ll keep my eye on it. Thanks for the heads up!

Also Usenet. Still around after decades. As long as people are hosting news servers, it will stay. The original decentralized protocol.

I haven’t figured out how to host my own news server.
Is there a resource about how to do this?

asynchronous

Any form of text based communication is asynchronous

as in the server chats with another
Centralized servers in which 2 users talk can be considered "synchronous" because they get the message nearly instantly, but yea, we often use NoSQL async calls for instant messaging apps
- Oh on a technical level yes. But on the surface it's still asynchronous, as long as you can't tell whether the other person has read your message (which, to be fair, a lot of messaging applications have as a feature)
For the people, yes.
With email, message delivery can be async as well.

It seems like a category error to compare email to Discord or Slack. The latter two are distinct companies and not protocols.

You're right in theory, but in practice the point is that email survives because it's not a closed, proprietary protocol.
Unfortunately I don't think the issue is quite so simple. We used to have open chat protocols that were slowly strangled by big tech until only their solutions remained.
I think the biggest problem is simply user apathy, if users cared more we wouldn't have the whole US green/blue bubble problem
- We kind of still have IRC.

Something could replace it easily if they tried to use the open standards and decentralized system like email has. But tech companies have gone too greedy, they won't make anything that works with other tech companies. Every one of them are trying to pull users to themselves. Now we have people with account in 5 different websites to communicate with different people instead.

It is sad how far the technology has come. It'd allow so much improvements in quality of life and yet it'll all being used to extract more money, making life shittier.

Hahahaha, good one!

And even instant and encrypted when using https://delta.chat/

its pretty cool

I need an alternative to gmail for creating new email accounts. Any ideas?

Get a cheap hosting plan. You'll get a domain, several mailboxes and you can mess around with services like Nextcloud
- you seem to have me confused with the IT linux wizard type lemmy. I didn't even understand half of that sentence
- Unfortunately, that doesn't work anymore. Even assuming you have the technical skill to avoid making your server into a spam relay the moment it's turned on. Which itself isn't easy, even for seasoned IT people.
  The major providers are Google, Outlook, and Yahoo. Even if you don't use one of those, you're going to be sending to people who do. To combat spam, they check your domain and see if it has a track record of not being a spammer. A brand new domain on a brand new host has no way of establishing that track record, and the email will bounce.
  You can get a track record by hosting your domain under an existing service. There's no way to bootstrap it on your own anymore.
OutLook? I'm still rocking my Hotmail address LOL
Tuta (formerly Tutanota) has worked well for me.

E-mail barely hanging on between spam, broken HTML and an oligopoly of providers.

Yeah email is one thing I don't bother to run on my own server, because all the oligopoly providers mark unknown servers as spam by default, so you can't send emails to anyone anyway...

The old internet was a crucible for robust software. Slow, small, unreliable, the very protocols that send data over the wire and through the air had to build in all kinds of fail-safe features to even approach usefulness. From this we got things like email (POP & SMTP), internet relay chat (IRC), and the world-wide web (HTTP). Things used to be so bad, that these technologies endure as extremely over-built in the modern era. And if things get worse, it will keep working as it always has. They'll probably stick with us because of that.

This is why I kind of hate microblogging platforms. This could just be part of a conversation, but shown of context every post is turned into a soundbite and takes on levels of faux-profundity that they can’t possibly support. Yeah, email has been around forever; so what?

What faux-profundity is on display here? Sometimes people just talk. Sometimes this includes observations. Kinda like what you did with your comment. I don't understand why you're bringing hate to a tea chat, but I suppose it can be good to get off your chest.

If by something else email will out live I agree

deltachat is awesome

That is why everyone should be using Delta Chat

I'm using cpanel email and it's terrible. Can someone recommend something cheap but better than cpanel?

What's wrong with cpanel?
- Some places block email coming from my cpanel email.

My most useful emails come from family and groups.io. Rarely some helpdesk response, though if it says reboot something, i stop talking to them.

FidoNet was the gateway drug.

My emails are just: bullshit, crap, order confirmations as most stuff is bought online and boatloads of phishing.

My emails are: correspondence, article follow-ups, LAN party planning, and of course the occasional Luis Vuitton handbag offer (quite reasonably priced, actually).
I do have the kind of transactional message slop you describe, but I have a seperate email address for those.