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.
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.
There are definitely gatekeepers. Even if your hosting provider isn’t blocking port 25 by default, SPF, DKIM and DMARC will see your emails going straight into the recipient’s junk folder/spam filter if not correctly configured. Hosting your own mail server at home is also a fantastic way to piss off your ISP, lose emails to downtime, have your IP blacklisted from many services and open up your environment to exploitation. It can be done but let’s not pretend that it’s easy or that there aren’t barriers to entry.
Mail servers are like filo pastry. Sure, you could go to the inconvenience and effort of making it yourself and I’m sure it’ll be very satisfying to do so. But 99% of professionals use the store bought version, and for good reason, because it’s a lot of effort for an end result that is no better and in all likelihood probably worse.
Mostly agree, but as someone who has been hosting my own email for years I can tell it is, in fact, better.
Quick note for hosting one on a residential IP - that would no longer piss any ISP off. You would simply not deliver anything anywhere due to IP being blacklisted by default.
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
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.
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.
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...
If only it was an open standard...
It... is? It's an open standard that anyone can use and implement. The main provider is Google and there has been a huge push from them to get Apple to adopt, which they mostly have. It's not 'owned' by any company. It's predominantly serviced by Google, but is in fact an open standard. Google and others have their own format which is how they and their apps interpret and interact with each other, but it is an open standard. There are some backend and requirements for it which stops most from setting it up and implementing off the shelf and just going with Google, but you absolutely could use and make your own format with the standard.
Yep, main reason it's associated with Google because they bought a company (Jibe Mobile) making one of the main backend service offerings and offered cloud hosting of it, so providers just went with that rather than rolling out their own software.
Also with Apple ignoring it in favour of iMessage, Google was the only one supporting it on handsets. Google client + Google backend = people think it's Google's iMessage competitor.
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
I guess that's why someone decided to build a chat app on the email protocol and infrastructure.
I love that this exists but never have used it.
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
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
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.
You can do it from a terminal. Us Linux kids will never let it die.
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.
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
For the people, yes.
With email, message delivery can be async as well.
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.
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
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.
Not so much though.
There was a moment when forums were the only kind of community but now forum use is dwarved by discord and reddit.
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.
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