Is there any hope? Or is it inevitable that big corporations will take over what started as a way to escape big corporate platforms and to focus on real communities and discussions and replace it with a toxic shithole pumped full of ads?
Is there any hope? Or is it inevitable that big corporations will take over what started as a way to escape big corporate platforms and to focus on real communities and discussions and replace it with a toxic shithole pumped full of ads?
Yeah on the whole it could be good, In the same way that it isn’t a problem that google owns the most popular e-mail service, that doesn’t hurt those on proton mail or any other mail service, and in fact offers benefits that they can just as easilly e-mail their friends using gmail from their preffered mail service. The real fear is the embrace extend extinguish. IE if meta encourages people to join their instance, then gradually makes things incompatible after major communities move to them, but they can’t prevent us from moving back just the same even if they somehow got us to jump there.
Due to the dominance of just a few companies’ big email services, it’s now almost impossible to set up an independent email server. Emails from small independent servers are just not delivered by Gmail and the like. They will only accept emails from other big email providers. In this sense it is a problem that Google owns the most popular email instance. They and a few other large companies have effectively turned a democratic and distributed system into a closed loop owned by a handful of big corporations.
Any reading on this? Seems a little outlandish. I self host an email server for both my business and personal use, and have never had issues sending or receiving mail. Not saying I don’t believe you, just that that has not been my personal experience.
Yeah, I’ve been running E-mail servers for a long time. You kind of have to get things right, like not configuring an open relay and properly setting up SPF (and maybe DMARC) but I’ve never had an issue with E-mail delivery to Gmail.
Even with all of that configured on my instance. Emails are sent to spam to gmail by default because it comes from a linode IP.
Rdns is setup. Dmarc is in reject with a simple spf record. Even went back and setup Mx records my vps uses. Still flagged.
I don’t think dkim mail matter. Since it already passes spf and dmarc.
shrugs
Maybe this guy is exaggerating. I haven’t tried running my own email server, but I have seen a few people recently complaining about problems with the big providers’ blocking policies. Here’s one I read recently:
https://cfenollosa.com/blog/after-self-hosting-my-email-for-twenty-three-years-i-have-thrown-in-the-towel-the-oligopoly-has-won.html
http://www.igregious.com/2023/03/gmail-is-breaking-email.html
It’s made up bullshit. It’s a pain to run email because most services require quite a few dns and other records set, as well as making sure you aren’t spamming from it. You can run an email server if you have yourself all day.
Never had any problems the last time my company self hosted our email server. Not sure what you meant by this.
On what planet can this be true when there are tons of companies and organizations that operate their own email systems? Have you ever spun up an email server and see what happens?
I don’t think it’s the existance of big providers, as much as the general problem of spam, lemmy will likely have this too one day if it grows big, with or without big corporate backed lemmy’s. Fact is, it’s trivial to set up an e-mail server, and have it send millions of spam messages a day to thousands of addresses. You can then register dozens of domain names for a few dollars, and fill the internet with millions of spam messages.
Which is why pretty much all e-mail servers default anything that isn’t known to be throttled (IE a gmail account won’t let you just send as many messages as your bandwidth can handle). A black list whack a mole is basically an unwinnable battle on that front, all anti-spam measures kind of have to start with a “prove you aren’t a spammer then we’ll whitelist you”, rather than the opposite.
But the main point still remains, there are dozens of e-mail providers that have proven they aren’t spam, and more or less ones that meet every overall goal one might have. Ones that don’t track you or put ads (some you may have to pay for, but that’s the options). Still 100x healthier than say facebook and twitter where you consent to all their tracking and rules, or you can’t talk to their members ever.
Is this some kind of hypothetical?
Kind of like how Facebook Messenger (and GChat, and AIM) used to federate with XMPP, and then dropped it like a bad habit once their platform took off.
I think it is really important for communities to spread out to avoid exactly this. Users can centralize, but distributed communities is what will prevent what you describe.