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Comment by vhodges | Hacker News Reader

I've been thinking about this very thing the past few days!

Forgive the rambling, this is the first time I've written any of this down...

My idea is to use email as a transport for 'social attachments' that would be read using a custom mail client (it remains to be seen if it should be your regular email client or have it be just your 'social mail' client. But... if using another client as regular email, users would have to ignore or filter out social mails). It could also be done as a mimetype handler/viewer for social attachments.

Advantages of using email: - Decentralized (can move providers) - email address as rendezvous point (simple for users to grasp) - Works behind firewalls - Can work with local (ie Maildir) or remote (imap) mailstores. If using imap, helps to address the multiple devices issue. Could also use replication to handle it too (Syncthing, dropbox, etc)

Scuttlebutt looks like a nice alternative though. Will be following closely.

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I had been thinking about something like that too some years ago. Subject or first line of the mail should act as headers for the mail client extension parser. You could tag the social object you send out (event, picture, status update) and users could subscribe to those (the client would just filter out)(it solves the problem of being interested in an author's upcoming books and social comments but not in his comments on his family vacation). Likewise you could choose who get your updates.

Problem is you don't have a mean to publicly advertise your status and offer a way to subscribe. That would be a third party provider. I can imagine someone fetching everyone's updates and providing a mechanism to just resend the mail via a public web repository that would act as a public registration hub.

That would be a huge data mine though. Unless you add pgp in the mix and then you have to hit the mark on the client pgp handling to easily allow close friends to give out their public key.

Wouldn't that make a fun POC project ?

I remember I was thinking about it when pownce came out.

I still believe the net would be so much more fun with the likes of pownce and w.a.s.t.e around :(.

I remember having some actual conversations on w.a.s.t.e. That's never happening with torrents.

The popular free email providers do not like busy transactional mail service.

Sure, but remember it's p2p and no different from me composing an email and BCC'ing my 50 friends and family.

One this I didn't mention was that there wouldn't be any public posts so definitely more social network than social media.

Anyways, just an idea at this point, though a prototype would not be that hard to put together as an experiment.

email is so complicated. There are probably 3 people in the world who know how to properly run an email server.

Who needs to run a mail server? It's a (specialized) mail client that uses your existing email account as storage and transport.

I like this idea and think it has legs. But, eventually it might be worth rewriting daemons for SMTP/IMAP that have a simple config file format that would allow simple white/blacklisting domains such that one could run a server that would reject all emails from any domain other than the 6 one specifies. Further, without pgp encryption/signing msgs are discarded.

I think such an approach could be interesting, but it seems there is a need for a non-profit to govern such a thing.

That's absurd. True, it has become more complicated than it once was, but that's every technology that isn't dead.

Granted, I have been running mail for a long time, so I got to learn the complications as they happened, rather than all at once. But anyone who can set up a production-quality web server/appserver/DB along with the accessories that go along with it can handle it.

Now if email isn't important to your business and/or you just don't want to deal with maintaining it, that's valid. But it just isn't as difficult as a lot of people seem to want to make it out to be.

" I have been running mail for a long time, so I got to learn the complications as they happened, rather than all at once. But anyone who can set up a production-quality web server/appserver/DB along with the accessories that go along with it can handle it."

Are you using Sendmail?

> Are you using Sendmail?

Not in a long time. I haven't found a situation in which I couldn't use Postfix in quite a while. Although the occasional sendmail.cf flashback still hits me.

"the occasional sendmail.cf flashback still hits me."

that's why I asked.

scuttlebutt has sneakernet options it appears. Email is just another transport mechanism.

So your approach should work in theory within the described framework.

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