Dablin

Siyuan. Ive been using it for a while now and find it very effective for my needs. Its gone through quite a few updates since i started using it and became open source in that time. It even has an android version as well which i do have installed on my phone but admittingly rarely use. I prefer writing information on a keyboard generally.

“A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.”

You covered one of the major points here. The unwillingness of people to learn new things that ultimately is not that hard when it comes down to it. Willful intellectual lazyness is paramount here.

Yeah I get it. It always sucks to have the OS break to a point of having to reinstall it. I’ve actually got a history years ago of breaking my DOS/Windows installs, though that is usually me screwing around with shit I don’t understand and don’t know how to repair the damage.

But that is all part of the learning experience I guess.

The right Linux setup actually isn’t that difficult. Relatively modern Linux is brain dead easy in comparison to how it used to be. I’ve been using computers since I was 8 in the 80’s. Back then even before using DOS, computers were extremely difficult to use and had near vertical learning curves. Even the early version of Windows could be pain in the arse to get certain things done/figure out; it was the just the nature of computers at the time.

These days modern operating systems such as Windows have been refined to the point where practically anyone can use it and get around with little difficulty. That is great and all but that is part of the problem. The bar has been dropped so low that if any of the users get provided any form of unexpected technical adversity that was prevalent in computers just some decades back; they consider it impossible to use. The biggest issue is most computer users these days are completely intellectually lazy when it comes to using them and how they work. Never in history has the technology been so widely available and yet the lack of understanding by its users has reached drastic levels of proportion.

Its not that people aren’t able to learn, they just don’t even care to even try. And yet these same people will go out 5 minutes later and do something else just as technically involved such as rebuilding a combustion engine or rewiring an electrical circuit in a DC motor or a myriad of other things.

You could be right. I am sure the entire situation was a lot more nuanced then I portrayed it in my previous post. And I am sure many of the email admins for companies had a lot more localised pressing technical issues to deal with for the companies they worked with then having the time to ponder on the implications of email centralisation from other businesses.

I will always promote technological independence though. And despite the hurdles that come with running any technological service locally/privately whether it be an email server or otherwise it is ultimately worth it for those who need/desire the full control and privacy of ones own data. At-least that is my 2-cents.

Though I agree with the points in isolation, this entire defeatist attitude is what created this problem in the first place. Within the last year I starting running my own email server with no previous experience or knowledge on the matter. I have learnt an incredible amount about the technology and unfortunately the disadvantages that come with it along with the monopolies by big corporations that have defacto control over the email infrastructure on the internet.

It is ironic that I have at times had my email server blocked for no reason by say Microsoft/Google but my sever has never sent a single spam in its entire history of its short existance; which itself is part of the problem (it has very low reputation); and yet 90% of email spam on the internet and especially what I have always recieved comes from email addresses hosted from those two big email providers; yet they never dare block each other.

I am annoyed by the actions of the earlier self-hosted email server administrators that in the past never made a decent and sustained effort to challenge these big corporations in the email space and help protect it from monopolisation. If they had made the effort that people such as Louis Rossman and others are making for sake of Right to Repair we wouldn’t be in a situation where self-hosting your own email server is such a pain in the arse because large corporations can block internet transfer of emails at a whim for no other reason because they feel like it.

I use Arch BTW. Sorry couldn’t help myself.

Unless you’re crazy like me and host your own email server :)

I like the direction Lemmy and Kbin has provided in terms of providing a messaging environment on the internet where it is more decentralized much like the internet of old.

Email on the other hand has taken a serious step in the other direction with email monopolies from the big names such as Google and Microsoft etc that have made self-operated email servers quite a bit more difficult to operate then it really should be, at-least from the perspective of actually sending email to other people using their servers and getting it in their inbox.

I find it ironic that Google/Microsoft etc use the excuse of spam/malware as the excuse to block self-hosted email servers with little to no email history/reputation yet most of the worlds spam comes from their servers.