I'd like to add one more very important aspect: you don't need to register with any or with yet another service, which will eventually fade into oblivion within a few years - or which will become so ignorant to privacy, like Facebook, that you end up deleting their apps and accounts.
Email is a set of protocol and thus it _will_ outlive any centalised, closed, walled garden.
(BTW this is what decentralisation people should understand: you need to build services using common protocols, not services which can be installed; mastodon is a bad example, activityfeeds or linked data are good ones)
Mastodon/GNU Social uses standardised protocols. ActivityFeeds is an attempt to unify the a different protocol as a W3 standard. With ActivityFeeds you also will need to install a service just like Mastodon. But the whole point is that you don't need to install Mastodon yourself, you can use one that's already hosted (similar to the early days of email -- these days you generally have to use hosted email).
The fact that the Mastodon craze still inherited the community from GNU Social is evidence that it is a well designed federated system.
My point is that if I don't want Mastodon, I still want to be able to talk to Mastodon with something else.
If this is already sorted, that's good, and in that case, sorry for lagging a bit behind.
What stops email going the way of XMPP?
Compare this to email, where every user expects their email client to be able to email people on different providers. If, say, GMail suddenly stopped being usable to email people without a GMail address, all users would think it was broken, not just geeks.
The trend to centralize email is a more subtle one. For instance, make email work better when emailing someone at the same domain (also because it's technically easier to handle): I have seen people trained by GMail to send huge files as attachments because it works when sending them to other GMail users. Also, spam filtering: a small email provider sending email to a large one has a higher chance of being flagged as a spammer, and has to support all requisite technologies (SPF, DKIM, SSL if you don't want the email to be marked as insecure, not being on a blacklist or residential IP, etc.).
Long sorry short, I'd have trouble imagining that a major email provider could realistically stop supporting "federation". Maybe it could happen if major providers unite to create a walled garden between them and to cut off everyone else (unrealistic), or if one provider's market share increased to near-monopoly (somewhat unlikely for now because of the long tail of institutions, companies, universities, who still want to run their own). I think the main threat to email is non-federated systems that are more convenient to use on mobile (e.g., WhatsApp and others), or social networks in general. (This may sound far-fetched, but in France I do see many companies who advertise support on Twitter and Facebook but cannot be reached by email.)
A better question might be: what can possibly replace email as an online identity - and also - do such a better job at it that I feel inclined to switch the 100's of services over to it - a task I would not take lightly.
Email is so much more than just a protocol.
mastodon uses OStatus underneath, which is an set of open protocols, pioneered by StatusNet.
I'm a Chinese living in the bay area. I think people here treat E-mails as part of their daily life probably because most of them began to use it before the mobile internet is a thing. On the contrary, in China where the majority internet users are mobile-savvy, WeChat is the new email. Actually E-mails are only for official communications there, and I don't think official communications can be treated as "social networks".
I'm wondering if the same thing is happening in other developing countries where people first touched facebook/whatsapp before even knowing E-mail exists.
Email is a standard. There are multiple providers. It's a great lowest-common-denominator.
Does any company really want a part of that without changing the above? I thought Uber establishing a "defacto standard" for ride-sharing which can be copied by competitors is one of the strategy points we criticize here on HN?
I don't know the Chinese market, but just keep in mind at some point everyone thought that FB/Twitter were going to kill RSS. Fact is, RSS is still around and being used a lot (Podcasts?). While FB/Twitter have restricted access to monetize (or prevent others monetizing) their proprietary platform.
Email will be still around when WeChat is dead and gone.
I highly doubt that. WeChat is so deeply embedded in daily life in China that I would almost consider it required to do anything substantial in China.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/world/china-watch/technology...
Email is infrastructure; people invest in it. If the only people investing in these chat apps are themselves people, these apps could be ghost towns in years.
In some sense you're right; in another sense, it still seems like email is likely to outlive walled gardens because there's no long-term reason to use them.
In particular, unless there's a decent way to ensure that nobody can take my received messages away from me, i'm unlikely to adopt it for anything but chatting with friends.
One of the Chinese court systems actually sends notifications through their WeChat account. I believe there are even pilot programs where you can initiate court cases through WeChat as well.
I found it kind of strange, anyway.
Also, who's to say communication won't become my-bot-against-your-bot kind of thing for instance? Given choice between standards and convenience people don't seem to think too long before going with the latter..
The majority of Internet users in the US - nearly 80% of US adults have a smartphone - are mobile savvy and were that way before the Chinese majority got there. Being mobile savvy has nothing to do with it.
You can search your message history. I think that's enough for most personal archives. Of course if WeChat goes away, many people will be unable to access their archives, but at the moment, few seem to be worrying about that.
> Being mobile savvy has nothing to do with it.
Not being internet savvy before becoming mobile savvy has something to do with it. I'd wager that most heavy email users had an email address before they got their smart phone.
If you don't already have an extensive email archive, keeping all your personal communication in email no longer seems so compelling.
Probably some correlation to your observations.
It's both a blessing and a curse, as anybody who's accidentally emailed the wrong people or hit send before finishing editing knows, but it's the most powerful thing about email (and SMS or even fax for that matter!) - you get your own copy.
When companies have kindly sent me their entire customer list (by using CC in place of BCC) I see there are very few domains in it outside of the major free email providers, and those that remain are mostly for their work or small business. A personal or family domain is very rare.
I have no huge issue with moving to a more IM-based interaction as my default, but I've yet to find one that is actually compatible with them all. I need 3-5 apps to communicate to everyone right now, and in a few years some of those will be gone and new ones will be added.
What I've learned from email newletters is that Microsoft Outlook needs to die a swift and horrible death.
There is absolutely no good reason why we should have to create email newsletters that require tables for layout.
I can imagine the same thing being done to email, where modern features could be built on top of email, which just gracefully degrade if those features aren't available in the client (e.g. something similar to inline source maps, which can decorate parts of the email for clients that support it, but are otherwise out of view for clients that don't). If the feature is useful enough, other clients will adopt them, pushing the protocol forward.
The problem is that people who send email need it to look a certain way, and leaving older clients behind, just like you'd have done in IRC/mIRC, is not an option. So having the option to use modern features doesn't change anything, at least for email.
There are dozens of apps like this. The most straightforward example is probably Redkix.
[1] https://mobile.nytimes.com/2010/11/25/technology/personaltec...
One of my projects over the last couple months for FWD:Everyone has been stripping tables from commercial emails while keeping their content and trying to preserve a comparable layout while just using paragraph tags and other simple markup. It's an interesting challenge, given that tables can be recursively nested inside cells in all sorts of different combinations. You'd think that it wouldn't even be possible to do this and get the ordering of block elements right, but it actually seems to consistently work for tables with mostly text content.
In our case the reason we did this because we want to format emails in a consistent way to make them readable, and also it's easier to guarantee that our redaction tool is properly redacting content when we limit ourselves to a fixed subset of HTML.
In a dream world Microsoft & Apple could partner together on this and create a better set of standards...
The type of element is less important than there being consistency and documentation.
But then by those constraints you can also count HTTP or SSH or Telnet or any other protocol at that layer.
For any end user, email is the universal communication mechanism.
I guess in theory you could leave an HTTP packet for someone to pick up months later, but existing networks would time it out.
(To be honest, the only thing I really like about slack over IRC is history. I wonder if that couldn't be processed in a more peer-to-peer manner over IRC?)
Is it really so bad? Is there anything on the horizon that could replace email as an open messaging protocol?
I guess kilobyte-sized text snippets are probably a pretty good fit for a blockchain-based trustless messaging service. A million monkeys are hacking on that right now, right? Maybe that will just leapfrog everything else?
My fear is that I have a different taste than you. How do you curate it?
I curate by hand using a custom tool that helps me search/filter articles and basically find a mix of things I like along with things that subscribers tend to click on. I tend to avoid "click-bait" type articles with little substance and try to get a good mix of things that were popular with things that should of stayed on the home page more. I've been doing this for seven years now, so I feel like I have something that works... but ultimately you'll have to see if it fits what you're looking for. :)
A recent issue just so you can see an example: http://mailchi.mp/hackernewsletter/360
--
A: Because it reverses the logical flow of conversation.
Q: Why is top posting frowned upon?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing on usenet and in email?Results in everyone using 'please see below' or 'above' and everyone being confused
Anyone know of an open source or paid Newsletter Management CMS? I'm working on a content site like inside, for a very small sports niche, and am thinking of making it a daily newsletter with paid subscriptions, instead of a regular website driven by WordPress or some other CMS, with ads, which would be super annoying and not monetize well these days.
We just added a secret new feature: inside.com/alerts, which allows us to send news to people by SMS if they can't wait for the emails.
In terms of paid newsletters, there will be 2-3 in each of 1,000 vertical with over $100-250,000 in revenue each based on what I can see.
Self-hosted AFAIR
Not the first, I'm sure, but possibly the best organised.
in this case, $10-25 a month is nothing... really, it's like zero dollars in the context of a business executive making six figures.
Still not sure I'd pay for it out of pocket (but who knows!), but I missed the B2B angle on the first read and was reacting to the price point as a news consumer. IMO neither the article nor the premium page does a great job of showing me that kind of value -- the only allusions to B2B value I saw were "research reports" in the article and "let us be your research team" on the page. But I suppose that's because you're still figuring out what premium should be.
Hope you figure it out and wishing you success here. I love me some email.
I view each email address as an LTV of $10-50 and every phone number as 2x that. Owning emails and phone numbers is the great asset any startup can have -- but so many founders miss this!
Independent contractors I've hired all prefer text.
The gym I'm a member of uses a facebook group rather than e-mail for communcating things like changes to the regular hours or special events.
Oh that have an address or two. Apple gave them one. A utility company gave them one. But its an afterthought