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Comment by chippyty | Hacker News Reader

I quit facebook, and voila' my privacy concerns are gone at once. I also quit whatsapp. I self host my email since years, so i don't have to use other people computers and let them read my emails. I also self host an xmpp server for chatting with my friends.

You know it seems to me that people spend a lot of time trying to solve a non existing problem, in this endless entropy.

Just let go, already.

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Quitting whatsapp is social and professional suicide. It's almost equivalent to suggesting someone just cancel their power bill. Like just get some candles and novels, you'll be fine.

Which profession requires WhatsApp?

Literally any profession where you publish contact information for customers to reach you. They'll be _angry_ if there's a barrier to communicate with you, and lack of Whatsapp, for some countries (I think particularly EU, south America) would be seen as such a barrier.

You may as well post only a UUCP bang path or a Telex identifier as your sole contacts, that's how baffled half of the people would be.

I installed WhatsApp for the first time in my life just a few days ago because I needed it to communicate with some event organizers at my current holiday destination. Once I'm home again I will uninstall it again and will probably not have a need for it before I travel somewhere else where it's used.

For the record, I am from Denmark which is in the EU. If people here use WhatsApp they are either expats or they need it to communicate with foreigners.

Maybe not hard required but it's such a common way to communicate with colleagues and customers in the EU. Not having whatsapp would be similar to not having a phone number. You might not get fired for it but you'll be known as "that weird guy that doesn't use whatsapp" and it won't do your carreer any good.

You cannot believe how fast people learn how to configure VPN. Or switch to another social network/messenger. Once one network is not available for everyone. Tested after FB/IG has left Russia.

The force of meta is not just addictive algos (algos are pretty shitty), but that is is available for everyone and everyone is on the network.

I wish I quit WhatsApp but it is virtually impossible in my country.

I quit WhatsApp and I'm now excluded from group chats with my family and friends.

Any tips on self-hosting email?

unless the account isn't important - don't. By the time you have a setup that isn't at the mercy of ISP outages, blackouts, misconfigurations etc. you have invested a load of time and money for not much gain.

Which makes me wonder: how hard would It be to offer an email service as a self-hosted app?

So you install this on a home always-on RaspberryPI or something and, after filling out some details, it just works. Would that be possible at all?

Some scripts that in the background get the right certificates and set the right records and so on should be possible, no?

There's so much babysitting required.

I've managed to wean all but one of my clients off self-hosted email. They are paranoid and insist on keeping it in-house. It's such a big time suck to deal with spam filter tuning and blacklist removal requests and the like, but they keep paying the hourly rates for it.

From what I gather, yes, that would work, but no, it wouldn't. Apparently all non FAANG mailservers are one misstep away from being put on all blocklists in perpetuity with minimal chances of appeal.

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