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You're right about the difficulty and the privacy, but I hope that people will still host their own little part of internet. The fundamental parts that you ca

You're right about the difficulty and the privacy, but I hope that people will still host their own little part of internet. The fundamental parts that you can host universally today are still a website and a mail server. Everyhing else like fileservers, webapps, federated services, streaming, vpns, game servers... have multiple implementations and evolve rapidly every year. If people no longer host the most fundamental services, it's leaving the play field to the industry. And one day we won't even be able to do it anymore.

8fingerlouie 3y ago
>If people no longer host the most fundamental services, it's leaving the play field to the industry. While i tend to agree, i also fear that this exact phrase is what is keeping email in the dark. Email in it's current form is old, very old, and everything "modern" about is DKIM, SPF, etc, has been added in the form of X- headers, but besides that, nothing much has changed, and because it needs to be compatible with potentially decades old software, nothing much will change. At the same time, email has been crucial to business/industry needs, and while alternatives exist, they kinda feel like the "instant messenger" days of the early 2000s, where there were a dozen or more different instant messaging networks, and you needed an account everywhere to be able to talk to people. Just look back at 2020 and COVID. How many different "Collaboration" platforms did you sign up for just to be able to work ? Teams ? Zoom ? Slack ? Discord ? How many of them are open standards ? How many different mail providers did you sign up with ? (making spam catching accounts for collaboration platforms doesn't count). Email is in dire need of a complete rework, but with so many different implementations of both servers and clients, that is not likely to happen fast. By "reducing" the number of participants, it allows changes to the standard to be more radical, and allows for faster propagation of those changes. As it is now, those changes can only be small, and must be iteratively rolled out. Many of the proposed addons like DKIM has almost a decade behind it (if not more), and it is still not mandatory. Email needs an "email 2.0" which breaks compatibility with older versions. Is this not an issue for the web then ? Well, despite having a relatively small amount of browser implementations, as well as a relatively small amount of web server implementations, at least compared to email, if you look at HTTP 2.0, that also took a long time to roll out, but i assume because HTTP has had a couple of decades less than email, the problem is not as widespread yet.

8fingerlouie 3y ago

>If people no longer host the most fundamental services, it's leaving the play field to the industry. While i tend to agree, i also fear that this exact phrase is what is keeping email in the dark. Email in it's current form is old, very old, and everything "modern" about is DKIM, SPF, etc, has been added in the form of X- headers, but besides that, nothing much has changed, and because it needs to be compatible with potentially decades old software, nothing much will change. At the same time, email has been crucial to business/industry needs, and while alternatives exist, they kinda feel like the "instant messenger" days of the early 2000s, where there were a dozen or more different instant messaging networks, and you needed an account everywhere to be able to talk to people. Just look back at 2020 and COVID. How many different "Collaboration" platforms did you sign up for just to be able to work ? Teams ? Zoom ? Slack ? Discord ? How many of them are open standards ? How many different mail providers did you sign up with ? (making spam catching accounts for collaboration platforms doesn't count). Email is in dire need of a complete rework, but with so many different implementations of both servers and clients, that is not likely to happen fast. By "reducing" the number of participants, it allows changes to the standard to be more radical, and allows for faster propagation of those changes. As it is now, those changes can only be small, and must be iteratively rolled out. Many of the proposed addons like DKIM has almost a decade behind it (if not more), and it is still not mandatory. Email needs an "email 2.0" which breaks compatibility with older versions. Is this not an issue for the web then ? Well, despite having a relatively small amount of browser implementations, as well as a relatively small amount of web server implementations, at least compared to email, if you look at HTTP 2.0, that also took a long time to roll out, but i assume because HTTP has had a couple of decades less than email, the problem is not as widespread yet.