It's Time to Give Up on Email | Hacker News Reader

It's Time to Give Up on Email

theatlantic.com

18 pointsfortran7738 comments

> Email technology wasn’t owned by someone in particular, so anyone could use it. That fact alone should have been foreboding.

So, roughly, "email is another example of the disasters of public standards and the lack of proper commercial stewardship."

As we'd say in usenet days; plonk

You get the irony of using Usenet as your rhetorical device, right? That was deliberate metacommentary?

What commentary would that be? What irony is on display here?

Everything in this article applies to literally every communications media available on the internet. As group discourse moves across protocols and platforms, the same problems occur. I'm not sure there's a meaningful difference between "plonk" and "lol blocked".

Right, but Usenet died.

We might have different definitions of 'died.' Approximately a hundred thousand non-spam posts a month in the text heirarchy and hundreds of terabytes a month in the binaries seems like a living system to me. I accept that this might not be enough for others to bother with.

Not so fast. I still read about a dozen newsgroups.

Ok. I believe you. Are the newsgroups in the room with us right now?

Yep. I click on this icon in my MintLinux panel and voila!

     Tue Mar 5, 2024  4:50pm                              TASS News Reader 3.7.2 jvs [linux]
                                                                   Group Selection
 
 
     ->      1  comp.os.coherent                    
             2  comp.os.cpm                         
             3  comp.sys.northstar                  
             4  comp.unix.programmer                
             5  comp.os.linux.misc                  1   
             6  alt.autos.mercedes                  
             7  alt.sys.pdp8                        
             8  aus.ads.forsale.computers.used      
             9  comp.emulators.misc                 
            10  alt.os.linux.mint                   42  
            11  alt.os.linux.debian                 
            12  alt.sysadmin.recovery

Next we go to group 10 and select

     Tue Mar 5, 2024  4:57pm                              TASS News Reader 3.7.2 jvs [linux]
                                                                  alt.os.linux.mint
 
 
          1  firefox security oddity                                                       9 Mike Scott <usenet.16@scottsonline.org.uk.invali   
          2  Logitech keyboard replacement issues                                          8 azigni <azigni@yahoo.com>                      
          3  Firefox-Ubuntu - How to restore tabs after <Ctrl>+<Alt>+<PrtSc>+REISUB ?      1 Adam <adam@no_thanks.com>                      
          4  dual boot - windows space requirement                                         6 TimW <timw@nomailta.co.uk>                     
          5  [OT} New desktop part 6.                                                     11 pinnerite <pinnerite@gmail.com>                
          6  Lonely Obnoxious Cantankerous Auto-contradicting Senile Ozzie Troll Alert     1 Peeler <trolltrap@valid.invalid>               
          7  Unable to install GRUB                                                       10 pinnerite <pinnerite@gmail.com>                
          8  Does anyone of you really think Mint Version 1000 will have the default a    24 Edmund <nomail@hotmail.com>                    
          9  wine-wine                                                                     5 Monsieur <Monsieur@notreal.invalid>            
         10  Recovering data                                                               4 pinnerite <pinnerite@gmail.com>                
         11  Flight simulators                                                             4 pinnerite <pinnerite@gmail.com>                
         12  Alternative to Vidalia for a Tor server on another computer of a network        TeddyTheBest2004 <teddythebest2004@europe.com> 
         13  No access to linux mint website??                                             2 TeddyTheBest2004 <teddythebest2004@europe.com> 
         14  turbocad LE                                                                  10 TimW <timw@nomailta.co.uk>                     
         15  Email host                                                                      Chris Holmes <chrispvholmes@gmail.com>         
         16  MySQL problem                                                                 9 pinnerite <pinnerite@gmail.com>                
         17  typing onto the desktop                                                       4 TimW <timw@nomailta.co.uk>                     
         18  De ontwikkeling van AI.                                                       2 Edmund <nomail@hotmail.com>                    
         19  Ignore wrong group.                                                             Edmund <nomail@hotmail.com>                    
         20  Thunar bugs                                                                   2 Handsome Jack (Jack@handsome.com)              
         21  Failed to read hd0                                                           27 RobH <rob@nospam.com>                             +
         22  Stop stealing focus                                                           8 Monsieur <Monsieur@notreal.invalid>            
         23  Anyone using Hypnotix?                                                        2 pinnerite <pinnerite@gmail.com>                
         24  Thunderbird 115.6.0                                                           3 pinnerite <pinnerite@gmail.com>                
         25  VideoDownloader doesn't work anymore so I tried Youtube Downloader Plus.     29 Edmund <nomail@hotmail.com>                       +
         26  Intel Iris XE graphics                                                        1 Jeff <jeff@invalid.invalid>                       +
         27  Clone a disk problem                                                          1 RobH <rob@nospam.com>                             +
     ->  28  No access to restored files                                                   3 Jeff <jeff@invalid.invalid>                       +

EC 4 ME

And now we have walled gardens and monopolies abusing people to death.

To death, you say!

Yes, we must lock down everything and make it fully proprietary. Imagine having interoperable systems without vendor lock in!

Why, there would be no where to send the invoices... the disorder, the horror.

Over the past two years I've been working on a business in Vietnam and one of the (many) frustrating things I've had to adjust to is that other businesses don't respond to email here.

It's my automatic response when I need information from a business to check their website for the email address and shoot them a quick email.

What happens in Vietnam when I do this: silence... Unless the business happens to be run or managed be a foreigner too.

All local businesses do list their email address on their website, they just don't seem to respond to it.

The majority of inter-business messaging happens on Zalo, with Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp as alternatives.

It's an annoying thing for me to transition to, it just feels wrong. My business email accounts are a permanent record of my business dealings. I can search and find anything I need there in seconds even if it was years ago in a different business than I work on now. Chat apps are not a good replacement.

It's because in many developing countries, phones are their only computers. They don't have a laptop. Therefore, quick messages is the preferred way over writing formal, formatted, long emails.

So we need something like XMPP that is as easy to set up as WhatsApp or Messenger and still uses an e-mail like address? I think a way to deal with spam is to issue a proof of work challenge to the sender.

> It's because in many developing countries, phones are their only computers

Do you really think that people who work in offices in developing countries don't have computers?

For sure there are many people here for whom their phone is their only computer. But those are not the people I am emailing.

Besides, for it's development level, Vietnam is a well educated and fairly high tech country, especially in the cities. According to this site, PC ownership is similar to Greece at around 10 per hundred people, but I am sure if you could filter by just the large cities it would come out as much higher:

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/computers...

Well, how else can you explain why you don't get replies via email in Vietnam and most businesses prefer to use chat?

Why don't you take a crack at explaining it.

It's because they still use Zalo and FB Messenger on their laptops, not because they don't have laptops.

I wrote short emails. Am I doing it wrong?

Yes. In Vietnam.

Techies discussing Twitter: “Open source, unmoderated, federated protocols are always superior, it’s time to get rid of Twitter, I hate Elon, etc.”

Techies discussing email: “What a crazy and insane Wild West, outdated, insecure and hard to use, we need to move on”

Generalizing people into "techies" doesn't necessarily mean individuals have inconsistent opinions.

Ok would it help you if I replaced “techies” with the names of my friends and coworkers who you probably don’t know?

There’s nothing inconsistent about believing open protocols are better and still believing a specific open protocol is not better.

Especially when that specific protocol is a 40+ year old one created when the creators couldn’t even imagine the world we live in right now and has barely changed since then precisely because it has been so successful.

I think federated protocols are better too, but Mastodon is literally replicating many of the problems with email one-for-one:

- identity management is hard - you place lots of trust in the admin - it’s hard(-ish) to pick up your data and move - it’s very hard to pick up your identity and move - you technically can host it yourself but only a few diehards are going to bother - moderation is mostly up to you, except when you can’t talk to someone you need to because your admin decided to start a flame war with another admin and de-federate - E2EE is server specific - no way to tell yet but eventually 99% of users will likely coalesce around a handful of servers

The protocol though, it’s just better!