this post was submitted on 31 Dec 2023
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what past technologies?
email is federated... every corporation eventually joined in and runs an email server, email is still independent....
i would really like some examples because i've seen the claim before.
Email is kind of an oligopoly though, if you're not one of the big guys it can get pretty frustrating to run an email server. Even if you do everything right, sometimes you just get randomly blacklisted anyway, you're at the mercy of the big email providers.
makes sense...
personally, i see this as a flaw in federation in general. Even diaspora's end goal, originally, was everyone running their own instances.
the biggest hurdle though, is getting people to care. Which happens temporarily, every once in a while... like when reddit fucked everyone over with api changes.
i tried to get everyone i know on diaspora when that was happening... got one person to try it for a second. At least with lemmy i don't have to know anyone else on here, so it just feels like the better og reddit anyways...
XMPP, Browsers (early days and why Internet Explorer is so widely known), Microsoft broke Java compatibility with non windows systems by replacing the native interface with their J/Direct breaking programs for other opwrating systems, MAPI has been accused of doing this to IMAP and POP3 (tho not to the same degree). Its mostly Microsoft, keep in mind even my own mother was born before the personal computer so this has all evolved within the last 50 or so years and completely pertains to software as far as I am aware. Here is a quick wikipedia page if you want to update yourself. There are plenty of battles to fight today, too. Its understandable to not have the will or want to get into it.
Email is not independent and hasn't been for a while. Go ahead. Try to run a mail server of your own. If you aren't paying one of the big companies, your email won't get delivered.
it's not that bad, really
like 80% of US ISPs block port 25 outbound. you're not gonna be sending emails without going through some additional commercial entity forwarding that traffic.
sure, find a VPN provider that provisions PTR records correctly, and it's not too hard to get your mail delivered if you read the docs. it's also true that that's notably more restrictive than any other "open" communications protocol i'm accustomed to.