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E-mail is largely centralized now. There's a handful of major companies who are able to run an e-mail service and communicate with the hordes of GMail's users w
by cwyers 9y ago
E-mail is largely centralized now. There's a handful of major companies who are able to run an e-mail service and communicate with the hordes of GMail's users who are living behind GMail's spam filters. (Spam filters, it should be noted, that make the service usable for most people.) So what happened is that decentralization worked for a moment in time, but as the Internet grew it worked less well, and we reinvented the pre-Internet solutions (BBSes/Prodigy/AOL/Compuserve) on top of the open Internet.
- Jansemon 9y agoIt is unfortunately true that e-mail is mostly centralized (as in even if I don't want to use GMail & Co., I will mostly communicate with people on those bign centralized platforms, thus giving them again my data). But it is absolutely federated - I have the choice of running my own server and can communicate with every other e-mail address on this planet. Unfortunately, it isn't easy to setup - average Joe has no chance to get his own server. On the other hand, for IT people it isn't extremely hard either. Once setup, it is nearly maintenance free... I'm running my (and a company) e-mail server since 2001 and I don't want to miss it. I only once had a problem with being blocked by big sites, after moving to a new server where the IP range has gotten on some blacklists, because of the previous owner. Also never a problem with spam filters. I hope e-mail will never be replaced - or at least there's some new way of communicating federated where every internet user is reachable.