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Comment by gonehome | Hacker News Reader

Correct - email is a failure as a federated system, people are centralized on a handful of providers and you can't even run your own server these days without getting blacklisted.

The promise of the decentralized web of the 90s is a failure. The majority of users are centralized on handful of megacorporation apps despite the ad business making this pretty awful.

We're trapped in a local maximum because of the underlying system designs. Spam, linux server admin being too hard, terrible devex are some of the forces that lead to this [0]. It's a hard problem to get out of without thinking from first principles.

[0]: http://moronlab.blogspot.com/2010/01/urbit-functional-progra...

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Well a handful is still way better than only one. If tomorrow someone want to leave Gmail they have quite the list of alternatives and can forward their mail to their new address. Compared to leaving Twitter or Facebook this is so much better.

It's like if Twitter was an ActivityPub instance even if it had 99.9% marked share at least you could leave without leaving everything behind

> people are centralized on a handful of providers

Still better than a closed protocol. The fact that Google knows everbody can switch away from Gmail without any real downsides for sure keeps them in check. There are no real network effects for one company to take advantage of, unlike it is the case with closed protocol systems like WhatsApp.

>The fact that Google knows everbody can switch away from Gmail without any real downsides for sure keeps them in check

They do? Changing your email address across every service provider you use is a colossal pain in the ass, and that's when they let you change your email address.

You can just forward incoming email to your old Gmail account to your new email account and take your sweet time to update your old emails all over the internet.

It’s not quite that bad. I ran my own mailinabox server on a vps a few years ago and didn’t have much issues with spam lists. Only gave up because I couldn’t be bothered updating the thing.

That's the death of all decentralized systems, it's too much work in the long run.

They work great when they're the ONLY option in town, but eventually people centralize on one aspect of it, as they did with email.

Email used to be so decentralized that it was literally run on your machine (not your terminal, which was dumb, but the machine the terminal connected to) and even a single company department might have 10+ machines that could receive email (email addresses would look like name@machine.department.company.com).

Then it devolved to one per department, and then one per company, and now one per massive IT provider.

Security became big as well. Mail servers used to get hacked constantly and you’d have your private data leaked and your server turned in to a spam gun.

These days to host anything securely you need a team of the top minds in that domain working full time on it. Just makes no sense to run your own mail server when for less money you could let someone else do it and they will do it much better.

This is just a sign of the industry maturing imo. You could relate it to construction. Used to have people building their own mud and stick huts but now everything requires planning, regulation, codes, licensed workers, etc.

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