Conversation

Notices

1. Gabe Kangas (gabek@social.gabekangas.com)'s status on Friday, 05-May-2023 14:38:17 JST Gabe Kangas

   • Aral Balkan
   • Mr. Teatime
   • Nour Agha :popos:
   • Laurens Hof
   @Nour @Mr_Teatime @laurenshof @aral Do share the massive variety of email providers.
   
   1. Embrace. Use the email standards such as SMTP to talk to other email servers.
   2. Extend. Encourage all email users to use your service by making it the default and positioning yourself as "the server" via applications and partnerships, eventually adding features that are limited to your mail interface.
   3. Extinguish. Say that all other mail servers that aren't yours are spam and block them.
   
   If you don't see how this could happen on the Fediverse today then I don't know what to tell you.
   • Gjalt-Jorn Peters (matherion@mastodon.nl)'s status on Friday, 05-May-2023 15:15:25 JST Gjalt-Jorn Peters

     in reply to

     • Aral Balkan
     • Mr. Teatime
     • Nour Agha :popos:
     • Laurens Hof

     @gabek @laurenshof @Nour @aral @Mr_Teatime I guess these things cannot be prevented by any technology in itself, so will always be political choices (i.e. depending on the people in power, their preferences, principles and ideals, stakeholder leverage, etc)?

     (this is a sincere question / 'hypothesis', this isn't my field so I don't know much about these dynamics 🙂)

   • Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)'s status on Friday, 05-May-2023 15:15:33 JST Aral Balkan

     in reply to

     • Mr. Teatime
     • Nour Agha :popos:
     • Laurens Hof
     • Gjalt-Jorn Peters

     @matherion @gabek @laurenshof @Nour @Mr_Teatime You can prevent it by designing technology that’s truly decentralised; tech that scales horizontally, not vertically. Tech specifically designed so there are no economies of scale.

     See, for example, https://small-tech.org/research-and-development/

   • Aral Balkan (aral@mastodon.ar.al)'s status on Friday, 05-May-2023 16:00:36 JST Aral Balkan

     in reply to

     • Mr. Teatime
     • Nour Agha :popos:
     • Laurens Hof
     • Gjalt-Jorn Peters

     @matherion @gabek @laurenshof @Nour @Mr_Teatime Optimised for one-to-one. One-to-many can be modeled on one-to-one. If individuals own the means of communication, they’re in charge. All nodes equal; no privileged nodes. The moment you privilege a node, that node will have incentive to scale.

   • Gjalt-Jorn Peters (matherion@mastodon.nl)'s status on Friday, 05-May-2023 16:00:38 JST Gjalt-Jorn Peters

     in reply to

     • Aral Balkan
     • Mr. Teatime
     • Nour Agha :popos:
     • Laurens Hof

     @aral @gabek @laurenshof @Nour @Mr_Teatime So, if I understand properly, technology that's optimized less for 1-to-many and more for 1-to-few? Or is there another core difference that I'm missing?

   • Nour Agha :popos: (nour@fosstodon.org)'s status on Saturday, 06-May-2023 00:47:43 JST Nour Agha :popos:

     in reply to

     • Aral Balkan
     • Mr. Teatime
     • Chris
     • Laurens Hof

     @cmw @gabek @laurenshof @aral @Mr_Teatime For sure and I completely agree. This is unfortunately the case when it comes to the whole internet and not just email. As such, this will be inevitable when the Fediverse goes mainstream. As much as I enjoy having our little safe corner of the internet, regardless of the negatives it'd bring, I'd prefer the Fediverse going mainstream and to focus on its positives, as the overall net outcome will be a much healthier and more open web compared to now.

   • Nour Agha :popos: (nour@fosstodon.org)'s status on Saturday, 06-May-2023 00:47:44 JST Nour Agha :popos:

     in reply to

     • Aral Balkan
     • Mr. Teatime
     • Laurens Hof

     @gabek @laurenshof @aral @Mr_Teatime There are lots in the privacy space alone, with Proton and Fastmail being the largest, apart from mainstream options and those offered by domain registrars. Hosting email is not something easy though, unlike an ActivityPub instance. Regardless, I don't rule out the possibility and agree with you, but I just personally feel that the fedi has way too many potential big players, since unlike email hosting, any person or company can easily spin up an instance.

   • Chris (cmw@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 06-May-2023 00:47:44 JST Chris

     in reply to

     • Aral Balkan
     • Mr. Teatime
     • Nour Agha :popos:
     • Laurens Hof

     @Nour @gabek @laurenshof @aral @Mr_Teatime hosting an email server is trivial. Blindingly so, with certain solutions.

     About the complexity of self-hosting an activity pub instance.

     What's hard about email is getting the big established players to accept email from you. To be accepted as part of the party and not spam.

     That part isn't part of SMTP. They make you jump through hoops of their design.

     They'll do the same here

   • Chris (cmw@mastodon.social)'s status on Saturday, 06-May-2023 00:48:18 JST Chris

     in reply to

     • Aral Balkan
     • Mr. Teatime
     • Nour Agha :popos:
     • Laurens Hof

     @Nour @gabek @laurenshof @aral @Mr_Teatime In as much as moving from a monopoly to an oligopoly can be considered an improvement, I agree.

     I'll be putting my hopes for actual change into truly decentralized approaches. #ssb or #SmallWeb