The issue is not storing the data, just like "email" doesn't store data. It's just a protocol and a data format. This makes it interoperable across whichever industry player wants to spring up and compete for your service.
Ex:
Don't like gmail? Go to ProtonMail. And you don't lose the ability to interact with people who do use Gmail.
Don't like Facebook? Go to Ello. But now you've lost your entire network.
The decentralized web will be built on data formats and protocols that allow you to take your data with you and force companies to compete with the quality of their service, not the size of their network.
If my friend can sign a message using the same key on both services - and I already trust that key is them - I can be almost certain it is them. Regardless of the service.
This is one of the first use cases for keybase.io - verifying identities across a few main social sites. (E: For clarification, Keybase makes it easier to find these proofs. It isn't necessary as part of the proofs.)
For example, you can find me on Reddit or Twitter and know it is me. You can also see my website URL and know that I own it - and a bitcoin address where you know I will receive the money. This is because I've verified that I own these accounts using PGP - and I've done the same for HN in my user profile. See: https://keybase.io/nadya
It's only 'solved' if you don't care about usability. PGP quickly becomes a nightmare when you consider the day-to-day things 'normal' computer users will go through (private key stolen, password to private key forgotten, phishing attacks to sign replacement keys for friends, etc).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_name#Japanese_names_i...
(edit: Today I learned that Kazuo Ishiguro is British. The statement below is completely wrong. I've managed to get his nationality wrong while enjoying his books for 20 years!)
So in the specific case of Kazuo Ishiguro, the sir does not apply. For Brits with family-first names, see the other answers.
Here's the rules for putting the letters after names: https://www.debretts.com/expertise/forms-of-address/letters-...
The Joint Forms of address gives you some clues about the order of words before the name: https://www.debretts.com/expertise/forms-of-address/joint-fo...
Note that most people don't know about this stuff, and don't really care about it.
Mr Berners-Lee surely won't feel offended because the person addressing him isn't a [UK] royalist?
Most of her subjects do not complain. Some of them think we should have done away with such notions of reigning over other people already.
FWIW outside celebrity circles it is often considered quite gauche to insist on such pompous titles.
If you insist I'd be happy with calling him Professor Berners-Lee (even assuming he doesn't still have an active official professorship). If you want to talk about proper titles then is Sir Berners-Lee also rude when it should, by the right of HM EIIR be "Professor Sir Berners-Lee" [when spoken]?
If you're worried about recognition I think Mr Berners-Lee is not lacking in that department and was already party to the Queens inner circle as a holder of the Order of Merit which appears to be a far greater royal honour than a "mere" KBE. He has my utmost respect, if you doubted it.
Increasingly and to the point of arguable totality, such titles are bestowed by popularity, committee, and HM Government. Damned shame, since it would mean more what it should were it not given to celebrity riff-raff for 'services to sport'.
I digress. You say it's fine as a non-'UK royalist' to use an improper title; I say I bet most of the world doesn't use even Mr, and I'd do my utmost to pay proper respect to local custom and any honours.
For example, I'm not Catholic, but I would of course refer to Pope Francis; not 'Mr Francis', or anything involving his birth (as opposed to regnal) name.
Pope is a high office, and Francis is his chosen name. It would be rude of you to call him by his birth name; it would be rude of him to insist you call him "Your Holiness", although you probably should if you're visiting the Vatican.
You are clearly free to call him whatever you want, but I would advise you to be honest enough to realize that you're projecting your feelings about royalists onto him, and not calling him what he has chosen to be called.
If a person is an MD, professor, and such then that's totally acceptable. If the designation is "the Queen says you have to call me sir now" I don't really see what business it is of the Queen's or that it's more respectful to recognise a person because "the Queen smiled at them" than recognising their actual work/effort as fellowship of a learned society does.
It's an anachronous system of nepotism; bleurgh. What's not to like./s
If I move from Gmail to Outlook, I can still email my friends but I can't go back and search our old conversations unless I export everything from Gmail to Outlook. If I switch from Facebook to Instagram, I can still message my friends but I can't see all of the pictures I posted on Facebook unless I export the pictures from Facebook to Instagram, but even then there are a lot of features of Facebook that I can't export data from because they just don't exist on Instagram.
History creates lock-in, and history is really hard to move around.
I think it's the ability to communicate that's harder to move around, and why there's such facebook lockin. Your social network and ability to communicate with them in a public/group fashion.
And the legalities of that.
FB did a major legal smackdown on someone trying to do that.
Is it? I think there's a way to get around that, if the protocol defines standards for verbs.
Of course, it's difficult and can grow wild, yet very much possible.
It doesn't need to be. For example, I moved my email between IMAP servers multiple times simply by dragging & dropping a swath of messages in Outlook. That Outlook (of all programs!) is the only tool that I know of that makes this easy is not a problem with the decentralized nature of email but simply with mediocre client implementations.
Not sure what you mean.
It works as easy with Mutt. Open IMAP folder, select all, save to [other IMAP folder or local folder, as you wish].
Works reliable even with very large folders, you just have to wait a bit longer until it's finished.
Recently we moved all our company mail with IMAPsync. Automated commandline tool. Awesome.
Who remembers RSS feeds? I miss those days. We should have some superior spin on that but for social networks.
Imagine Facebook, but your history/data were your own property. A friend would find you on Facebook, or Ello, or AnythingAnyWhereBook ... add your feed, and done. Then it is up to the Social Networks to make a superior product for you to enjoy your friends data and interaction.
Right now it's about the monopolisation of our data.
Zuckerberg. If you're reading. Your current model is bullshit.
Anyway, to the point, try using RSS with facebook in the above context.
I hate being locked in - hence I gave up on FB. It's trash to me until it solves this issue.
For me they're different things. RSS is for things that I want available until I get around to reading them or until I manually mark them as read, this is precisely what I don't want out of facebook.
Intruigingly given how many RSS feeds are out there from WordPress blogs, about the only way I found to get news on WordPress releases is via their RSS feed.
I think a big missed opportunity for Google on social was the failure to cultivate Google Reader into an open social network (it already had social features), and build each aspect of it on an RSS/OPML-like structure.
That's the importance of open protocols.
The difficulty with decentralising is that these are the biggest challenge to centralised systems like Facebook; they're problems which are very nice to have ("oh no, we have a billion users!").
The biggest challenge for decentralised systems is getting momentum behind an agreed-upon protocol.
Email was born when there were few people who needed to agree, and their major concern was being able to send/receive messages. As the Internet expanded, the momentum behind email ensured that it could ride that wave as well.
These days the Internet, and hence the number of people who need to agree on the protocols, is huge. Think about, for example, HTTP2; how many organisations and individuals were involved in its definition and publication? How many more have been involved in implementing it for various browsers, servers, crawlers, libraries, etc? How many more have been installing updates, editing config files, etc. to use it?
Another change is the concerns of the stakeholders; if all we cared about were sending/receiving messages, then we could use something like telnet, HTTP, email, etc. Instead, the concerns are more fuzzy (e.g. "presence", "likes", etc.) and more political (silos vs federation vs p2p, expectations of privacy, encryption, archiving, searchability, etc.). Reaching agreement on such things is very difficult, as everyone wants different things.
The results either:
- Have buy-in from too-few people (e.g. diaspora, pump.io, gnusocial)
- Are so general as to be inappropriate for most particular tasks (e.g. RDF; an interesting example considering that RSS is a stripped-down subset of RDF, and is/was widely adopted; also compare to ATOM, which took that subset, threw away the ties to RDF, and became more interoperable!)
- Only offer tiny featuresets (e.g. the various microformats)
Email is a mess of kludges and frankly could benefit from a ground up re-implementation. In fact many have tried. But like with creating a decentralised social network, it doesn't matter if you have an arguably better implementation if you don't generate the snowball effect attracting users to your "better" platform.
RSS 0.9 was RDF, as was 1.0. 0.91–0.92 (and the 0.93/0.94 drafts) and 2.0 had nothing to do with RDF.
These days however it's not the people who decide, it's organizations.
>Think about, for example, HTTP2; how many organisations and individuals were involved in its definition and publication?
Many may be involved, but very few can decide whether to use it or kill it. Namely, Google and Facebook would be enough. Descending down to individuals, it's about 3-5 from Google and one from Facebook.
It was like 'AI' in the 80's, but with XML.
https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon
It's like a decentralized version of Twitter, with federalization. Might need to find a instance that's not busy with signups though.
I really like the idea that Eben Moglen seems to pitch in every of his recent talks when talking about FreedomBox:
A decentralized network of cheap "plug-computers" that run Facebook-like functionality on the hardware of the users. And yet, while FreedomBox is a great project and does many things right, it omits the one crucial aspect of this: the decentralized social network.
Let's hope Solid or something similar takes over the social networking world eventually and we can get rid of all the megacorporations hoarding our data.
I run a GNU Social site. It works well. It's a bit slow and the themes are out-of-date, but if it had more of a following I'm sure we could turn it around.
These days I'll always take a paid service over a "free" one where I'm the product.
Ultimately I'd love to host everything myself. But, at present, I don't have the technical knowledge to trust myself to secure everything.
On top of that, on an even more emotional level, the principle of myself being the product doesn't sit right with me.
Gmail considers anything beyond big corporate email providers as second class participants - and so does the other big providers.
I've used one of the many blacklist check websites to test my domain and only ended up with two false positives which I've rectified through their web forms.
It was mostly smooth sailing from there.
Note that this is using a dedicated server as a host, a while ago I tried the same thing from my home ADSL (with a static IP) and that was a pain since those "home" addresses are generally blacklisted by default since people tend to assume that emails from those addresses are sent by compromised computers.
Nowadays I know many ISPs even block port 25 by default so that's not even an option anymore.
This may not apply if you are a low volume sender.
But if I were running email for any new organisation I wouldn't have that luxury ofcourse - I'd have to pay for a Google/outlook or other major provider account - or spend a lot of time "reversing" the reputation of the ip/ip block my dedicated servers had - and as none of the major providers provide a simple check like rbl etc - it's a frustrating guessing game where your test-mails to your own Gmail(etc) account go through, but mail to new senders is silently dumped to the spam folder.
I don't mind greylisting, mail bouncing or blacklisting. It's the magic "intelligent" filtering which is annoying - because the only indication of error is that you don't get a reply - because your recipient haven't seen your mail.
In a way it's worse that it's rare - you never know if you've fixed the issue, or some arcane combination of your sending configuration and email content (an email not in English?! Probably spam!) will mean a new recipient will never see your mails.
We've been running on the same domain+IP for over a decade. Hotmail block us when we're whitelisted by the original sender and also responding to an email and also have corresponded before. We've never sent even a multi-person email never mind spam, always as a response to an enquiry, very low volume.
We're blocked apparently because Hotmail has an intermediate level warning on a sender domain on another IP address managed by the same ISP; we were un-blocked before but they now say they won't allow our email through - we have SPF but can't work DKIM with our shared status. The only silver lining is they actually responded inside a fortnight to tell us that they're going to continue blocking our [at most] once a week emails to our customers who happen to have hotmail/live/outlook addresses ...
To work around I made a live.com address to send through for customer who use MS email. ~4 days later they started blocking it from remote access ... something like not enough direct website logins for the amount of IMAP lookups (a single client checking every hour or so during work hours). Few log-ins seemed to fix it.
We can pay to have the spam service MS use whitelist us though, apparently.
You have to accept and work with changing expectations.
If you are unable to relocate to more reputable hosting, and your messages are legitimate, solicited, authorised, well-formed transactional email (no promotional mail shots), I suggest you switch to delivering through a squeaky-clean provider like Postmark.
They could just obey their own customers white-listing, or over-ride blacklisting for domains that act appropriately.
So you really think that having a domain of 10+ years standing that doesn't send unsolicited emails at all is "not behaving like a first class citizen"?
If someone in your ISPs /26 sends spam from a different IP and using a different domain, that totally means you're a massive spammer who's ruining the internet??
I could of course change ISP but which of the 15+ yo ISPs will have a spammer somewhere in their IP block, no way to tell.
So the only option left is pay to be able to send email to MS addresses. And you're fine with that? It's all our fault for replying to emails?
Your expectations don't match reality and you seem to prefer complaining to change.
I have basically no sympathy at all, I'm afraid. It is your fault, not for "replying to emails" but by failure to update infrastructure as the context changes. This is your problem to fix, and it appears you've made poor choices in that direction based on a misattributed sense of entitlement.
But how is such an effect not an issue? It makes it hard to "elevate" a box at home to a proper mail server, and makes it hard for new generations to host their own mail (until an ip6-only world (and probably also then) all new users will need to recycle old ips).
As for dmarc, I'm still not entirely convinced it's a great solution to smtp/spam issues. Dkim is already annoying enough if you occasionally want to send mail through/from a different smtp - like Gmail if you don't run your own webmail.