Hacker News Reader

Comment by neuronflux | Hacker News Reader

I imagine you avoid Google because you don't want to get locked into their centralized closed source ecosystem and don't want them to track your entire online presence. So I'm surprised to see you say email should be avoided, as a completely open decentralized communication protocol.

Your stances on these two topics just seem to be in contrast with each other, would you care to elaborate?

View on HN

I don't care about centralization or their tracking particularly much on their own. I don't like to use bad software. It bothers me, fundamentally. I naturally ended up far away from Google by virtue of not liking things that waste computational resources, which all of their software does, and has for years. This is the same reason I stopped using Windows and OS X. I like to use software that makes me feel good, and megabytes being wasted by tracking scripts and terrible Javascript frameworks does not make me feel good, so I avoid their standalone services and block their parasitic services.

However, email isn't really a good decentralized protocol. All federation fails at being meaningfully decentralized given enough time. There are great decentralized protocols; email is not one of them.

It’s insane how fast a barebones linux desktop system feels these days. Even an rPi 4 can be really snappy with the right desktop environment and window manager. It makes one realize how slow and inefficient all these modern web technologies have become in practice.

It’s been happening for decades, but while computers get orders of magnitude faster, software gets slower at a faster rate, consuming all of the gains and then some.

Edit: here’s an interesting example just looking at input latency: https://danluu.com/input-lag/ if you take the browser into account as part of the system as well, I’m sure it’s much, much worse.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com