Speaking of such things, an email client or an email server are never as monopolistic as Chrome.
So maybe email is a good candidate for something that should be torn down and built anew right after the Web.
Also email doesn’t have to be destroyed entirely, it’s very modular.
Where they had UUCP paths, and now have addresses in some services, just need to have John Doe <3cec7f8c438fa578dbd3a1557b822df469490a12>, with 3cec7f8c438fa578dbd3a1557b822df469490a12 being a hash of “johndoe” here and a hash of his pubkey in reality, and his pubkey can be retrieved from some public directory.
And have the letter signed by it (and encrypted possibly, though this of course would hurt server-side solutions of spam problem).
Frankly they can have a common replacement, in my humble opinion. When separating identities from servers, one can do the same with websites. How is a newsgroup fundamentally different from a replicated website collaboratively edited? If a letter can have a universal identifier, what prevents one to put a hyperlink to it? If we need scripts, what prevents us from having them in a letter’s content? If we need to reach a server by hostname and IP, what prevents us from doing just that from a letter, just the letter being the primary point of entry?
I just think that the old “vector hypertext Fidonet” joke is not so dumb, if you think what it could literally mean.
grue@lemmy.world 3 days ago
That’s how you get monetized spying enshittified email. Do you want monetized spying enshittified email?
boonhet@lemm.ee 3 days ago
Like Gmail?
taladar@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
Is that different from the unencrypted email we have now that is 99% spam and the other 99% are delivery problems due to anti-spam technologies?
WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
maybe I’m doing something wrong but in the past 2 years none of my mails were spam
taladar@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
That is mostly because the big mail providers like GMail do not accept mails from just anyone anymore (part of the aforementioned anti-spam technologies) and put the rest of the spam into a separate folder.