4 ms·

Few things are perfectly anything, and email is way more distributed than (say) Twitter messages. In particular, I own my own domain (which costs little), and

Few things are perfectly anything, and email is way more distributed than (say) Twitter messages. In particular, I own my own domain (which costs little), and then set up where my email goes. If I want to change email providers, I can do it without having to track down everyone who knew my old email address. Similarly, if I don't like my domain registrar, I can change that too. Being able to control my own destiny, and not being completely under the control of someone else, is in my opinion the real goal. Distributed & decentralized systems at least hold out the promise of meeting that goal, and where they do, I'm delighted. It's not perfect, but it beats many other systems.

account42 4y ago
To add to that, while DNS is centralized at the root, that centralization is unavoidable if you want to have human-readable addresses that consistently resolve to the correct recipient. And each TLD is (at least the ccTLDs and the old gTLDs) managed by a government or international organization acting on behalf of governments, which in turn (at least in theory) act on your behalf. While this system is not perfect (see e.g. the US governments history of seizing domains) it is almost infinitely better than most other communication mediums on the internet where the single company operating it can kick you out more or less for arbitrary reasons and without recourse. That alone makes this system precious enough that any pains from running your own mail server are IMHO worth it if it means that we can preserve Email as we know it - as a federated system not under the control of a single or a small number of corporations. Unfortunately, Email is at risk. For a lot of people it is already synonymous with Gmail and while Gmail is hardly the worst when it comes to deliverability (IME that crown goes to Microsoft) they do control enough accounts that they can pretty much nuke your little server if they want to.

account42 4y ago

To add to that, while DNS is centralized at the root, that centralization is unavoidable if you want to have human-readable addresses that consistently resolve to the correct recipient. And each TLD is (at least the ccTLDs and the old gTLDs) managed by a government or international organization acting on behalf of governments, which in turn (at least in theory) act on your behalf. While this system is not perfect (see e.g. the US governments history of seizing domains) it is almost infinitely better than most other communication mediums on the internet where the single company operating it can kick you out more or less for arbitrary reasons and without recourse. That alone makes this system precious enough that any pains from running your own mail server are IMHO worth it if it means that we can preserve Email as we know it - as a federated system not under the control of a single or a small number of corporations. Unfortunately, Email is at risk. For a lot of people it is already synonymous with Gmail and while Gmail is hardly the worst when it comes to deliverability (IME that crown goes to Microsoft) they do control enough accounts that they can pretty much nuke your little server if they want to.