this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2024
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Yeah, that does bother me. But it's also a lot easier to build a centralized service like that than to get people on a decentralized one.
If you really want something private and are willing to jump through a few hoops, Simplex exists. But most people aren't willing to jump through a few hoops, and even Signal (a pretty low bar) is a hard enough sell as it is. And that's why I use Signal, because it's my best chance to get people onto something better. In other words, don't let perfect be the enemy of better.
Yet pretty much everyone uses the same one: gmail.
Sure, and I use Tuta. Those are outliers, the vast majority use gmail, or at least the vast majority in my circles do.
It's the same thing as the network effect, just a little less ubiquitous, people will tend to use whatever everyone else uses. Getting something new like email (SMTP) is a huge endeavor, it's a lot easier to just build a centralized service and get people to use that, and most people will use the same provider anyway.
I don't like it, but I understand why it works and is so common.
No, those being outliers means the email argument isn't particularly strong, especially when talking about a new standard. If most people use a single service anyway, why would a company go out of its way to make something decentralized? And for something like encrypted chat, that's a lot of extra work.
What, by starting as a government system using a completely different protocol, then adapting to always-online network connections (i.e. universities) at a time when spam didn't really exist?
The 70s and 80s were a very different time, and regular consumers didn't use email until it had gone through several iterations. Even so, most people used a single implementation (sendmail on BSD) for quite some time before anyone else got involved.
The internet today is a very different beast, you can either try for an open standard, or you can try for user acquisition. Almost nobody seriously goes for the open standard anymore, unless it's an iteration of an already existing open standard.