The talk about “enshittification” made me think of the very email we use for the instances we signed up and instantly, it paints a grim picture. One of my account used gmail to sign up. Some proton mail. It reminds me that these too are companies beholden to their shareholders.

Is there a fediverse answer to email? Like what mastodon is to twitter and lemmy is for reddit?

If not, maybe the fediverse can think about allowing email-less sign-ups?

As an addendum, what about the popular tools we use in our daily lives? The calendar, note tools, etc all are products of companies driven to maximize profits.

There’s a talk in the technology sub about how GitHub was acquired by microsoft and I’m willing to bet that it’s not the only popular tool that was or will be endangered of disappearing or turning worse in the name of profit.

Is there a community movement that can somehow mitigate this? Or is there really no choice for us? Is there a complete list of FOSS somewhere that are at par or at least only mildly worse than the popular mainstream ones?

  • kitonthenet
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    11 year ago

    I’m worried that the recommendation against self hosting email is killing the open web. “Things are too complicated” is a reason for companies to put the services behind walled gardens

    • Guadin
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      11 year ago

      Companies (and spammers) already fucked it up. It’s hard to keep your own mailserver of all the big companies black list.

      • kitonthenet
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        11 year ago

        I’d argue that having a small server users want to talk to forces the big players to play more nicely. I know the difficulty involved, but recommending against it just makes it worse