this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2023
236 points (94.7% liked)

No Stupid Questions

35919 readers
1473 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

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?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] TheFogan 37 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (5 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

Never had any problems the last time my company self hosted our email server. Not sure what you meant by this.

[–] dmmeyournudes 3 points 1 year ago

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?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Is this some kind of hypothetical?

[–] TheFogan 2 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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

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.

[–] cerevant 6 points 1 year ago

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.