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Comment by rcme | Hacker News Reader

Git is great. It’s FOSS, but that doesn’t mean it’s immune to a hostile corporate takeover. Take email for example. It’s an open standard, yet it’s usage is dominated by large corporate players.

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Email has the issue that it wants to be an arbitrary person-to-person communication protocol, which communicates through servers. Therefore, if I want to email you, the behavior of your server is my problem. The set of such people I may want to communicate with is large and heterogenous.

Git does not have that problem. If four of my buddies want to get together and start a startup together, and I start out by simply setting up git on an SSH server, the four of us do not care that GitHub recently extended the Git protocol with a hot new feature that only works on Windows 13. We just use our git. I am not in the position of wanting to share arbitrary source code with everyone in the world. The relevant social circles are much, much smaller.

I don't know that I'd say git is immune to such takeover, but it is about as resistant as it is feasible to be.

The problem with GitHub isn't git. In fact, that is the least problematic aspect of all. The git repo, the branches, the tags, commit history, signatures, that's all the stuff that is not only easy to take with you, the git protocol all but stuffs them all down your throat with a "git clone". You have to ask git not to give you a fully independent copy of the whole repo.

The problem with GitHub is all the other stuff; the issues, the PRs, the conversations in there, the fact you gave out so many URLs pointing to github, etc. The thing that makes me most nervous about GitHub and my Go libraries is that if GitHub does turn evil, I've got "github.com" embedded in a lot of people's source code. I've decided it's not quite worth it to host on my own domains (plus I imagine people look askance at that anyhow) but it's a long-term concern of mine.

I don't get it, what exactly do you think is wrong with the email landscape? Its a standard protocol everyone can use, the only restrictions being when you start using other's services. Maybe I'm just not abreast enough on this.

I you want to send email from your server, you're entirely dependent on how the other servers run by the recipients view you. So if you have a bad IP address, they might not let your email through. The procedure for establishing yourself as a legitimate sender of email and not spam varies, and would need to be resolved with the operators of every server you might ever want to send mail to.

So you're running your mailing list which people have triple opted into, with confirmations and everything. Someone marks your email as spam and now everyone with a google address is bouncing. You contact google to resolve this and get a canned reply saying they've reviewed it, it's correct, and they will take no further action, and won't discuss it further. Good luck.

How does this detract from email, the standard?

It impacts email as a standard because Google is a gatekeeper of what is supposed to be an open standard.

Google is a gatekeeper for it's customers. Which is quite fair I guess. You are not entitled to anyone else's inbox

And Google has such a dominant position in the marketplace that your only choice is to use Google (or a handful of other large providers). That was the thesis: E-mail is an open standard dominated by large corporations.

That is definitely not the only choice. There are services out there or you can also use your own servers. Google being big does not limit your choices on how to host your own email. Again, you are not entitled to other people's inboxes.

I have a few VPSes and domains, and tried to set up email on one of them recently.

Jumped through every hoop, got rDNS, SPF, DMARC, and DKIM all configured correctly...only to find out that the major email providers (at least Google and Microsoft, which account for a depressingly large fraction of email accounts) have decided that the VPS provider doesn't meet their standards, and either auto-block or mark as spam anything I send.

So I'm left with the choice of trying to migrate my entire VPS to a different provider—after figuring out which one, if any, Google and Microsoft actually deign to bless as being worthy of sending email to them—or not host my own email.

The email standard never specified or guaranteed access to the majority of inboxes (or any inboxes in fact). It's literally just a technical standard to conform to or not. Successfully transmitting emails to another inbox is completely orthogonal and based on the personal, or corporate, decisions of the sender, receiver, and anyone else in the chain.

There is no provision for a fair shake, special categories for new entrants, or anything similar.

What value is an open standard if it can only be useful if you use an implementation from a large corporation. It’s a basic fact that email is only useful if your intended recipient can receive your message. If corporate gatekeepers are restricting valid usage outside of their walls, then it ceases to be an open standard. It’s like the difference between source available and open source.

How does this relate to my comment?

Nobody said it does. The clarification of it detracting from email the standard is yours.

It nonetheless demonstrates how Pareto allows popular providers to make decisions that negatively impact those who want to exercise the freedom granted to them. It doesn’t run in isolation, after all.

Considering that the user, LanceH, was directly replying to:

> I don't get it, what exactly do you think is wrong with the email landscape? Its a standard protocol everyone can use, the only restrictions being when you start using other's services. Maybe I'm just not abreast enough on this.

I would say most readers would interpret that as in response to email, the standard.

The reply made it clear that the problem is with the email landscape, not the protocol:

> you're entirely dependent on how the other servers run by the recipients view you.

A protocol can be bulletproof. But spammers will spam, blockers will block, trusted platforms will control.

The alternative is a spam and scam mess that would kill email.

BS. There are and were (I lament dspam) excellent spam filters, plus if you enforce greylisting barely any spam gets through.

Indeed. And if we hit spammers with half the hammer that pirates have been hit with, it'd be a much smaller problem ... but for some reason, spam seems to be immune to legal action.

Spam inflates numbers and ends up benefiting nearly everyone except the end user in the short-term: - Platforms benefit from larger activity volume, thus increasing their numbers and $$$ - FTC and other regulatory bodies get to take low-effort actions and tout the massive effects, ignoring the fact that they're slapping the ocean with a stick. - All the systems in between are charging each other for artificial traffic, resulting in a convenient ponzi-like situation. I wouldn't be surprised if large chunks of vendor (SendgridTwilio, cloud providers, etc.) revenues are from illegitimate business.

I imagine a similar thing is happening in the phone space too. Scam calls are 99% of the calls I get on my cell phone now, and probably close to that for "revenue from calls" that the providers are raking in.

If I could spin up my own cell network like I could an email server and a domain, you bet that the big cell/telecom players would "blacklist" my domain for "spam" the moment they caught whiff and instantly make it almost useless, same as Gmail does.

What about non-technical users? For my parents and siblings, using "free" online email from a major provider, like Google, Microsoft, or Yahoo certainly keeps them safer than old school POP3 (download to your PC). Email can get lost, scanning attachments was poor, and spam filtering was terrible, even by major Internet providers.

Dude... IMAP is decades old. I used Squirrelmail webmail when gmail came out.

In my pre-webmail experience, many ISPs did not offer IMAP as it requires them to keep email stored on their servers long term. The advantage of POP3: They force you to download it.

You can run an LLM in your browser now. Pretty sure even a low parameter LLM is more than capable of detecting spam. And thats not even considering more specialized approaches.

It is true that opt-in has bad UX. You can't easily "never send to spam".

Git lfs is a lousy hack. I wish git had better support for large binary formats.

The sad thing is that there's not much in Git's data model[1] that makes it bad for storing large binary blobs. An alternative implementation of Git (the program), or even a future version of vanilla `git`, could handle them just fine without the lfs hack, which I agree is horrendous, by using a different on-disk format for them and/or making sparse clones easier, and thereby remain 100% compatible with every other Git repository.

[1] There are some tweaks I would make, like using a standard Merkle tree hash function instead of sha1("blob "+size+"\0"+data), and a text-based encoding for commit and tree objects, but those are bike shed paint. I created a Git-like system based on these ideas that uses URNs and RDF/XML to make going 'under the hood' with a text editor a bit more pleasant than the experience with Git is, which is important because Git's tooling is far superior: https://github.com/TOGoS/ContentCouch/

Shallow/sparse clones help with some of the pain points there, at least around time to clone and local repo size.

I’ve got Jenkins configured to heck and back. Still a hassle though, and it’s clear it’s not a full solution.

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