Microblog Memes

It’s reliable, it’s simple, it’s free, and virtually everyone who uses the internet has one. Email won’t be replaced for a LONG time.

Sidenote: Remember when having an email address was enough, you didn't have to have a fucking phone number as well? Stop trying to de-anonymize the internet, you're making more problems than you're solving

It's why SMS still exists too. It's from an era where everyone just used open standards instead of trying to create their own thing for money. Big tech conglomerates like we have now didn't exist. The state of the tech industry and it's proprietary standards is absolutely fucked.

I work in B2B IT support, and email is designed to be very async, and for the most part it still is. What I can say with certainty is that business folks expect email to be instant like synchronous platforms are... It's not, it never will be... It's gotten about as close as it can be, but it is not, and will never be, instant delivery, no matter how much they want it to be.

Thousands of years after humanity has destroyed itself with nuclear weapons...

As the sun peeks through the gray clouds and lights up a solar panel...

A long-forgotten server hums to life...

And sends an email...

"Attention Required: Your Order is Delayed"

The old internet was a crucible for robust software. Slow, small, unreliable, the very protocols that send data over the wire and through the air had to build in all kinds of fail-safe features to even approach usefulness. From this we got things like email (POP & SMTP), internet relay chat (IRC), and the world-wide web (HTTP). Things used to be so bad, that these technologies endure as extremely over-built in the modern era. And if things get worse, it will keep working as it always has. They'll probably stick with us because of that.

I still have a weird email friend who refuses to chat over any apps and I totally can respect that. :)

I guess that's why someone decided to build a chat app on the email protocol and infrastructure.

https://delta.chat/en/

Mail has the big advantage of being totally cross platform. And it works, basically everywhere.

It’s because it isn’t a silo?

Discord, Slack and a bajillion similar apps do not meld with other apps. Email just happened to hit critical mass before “let’s try to get a monopoly” became the slogan of all tech, and collectively Big Tech is too stupid/hostile to replace it with some cooperative protocol.

iMessage is another pure example of this.

That is why everyone should be using Delta Chat

deltachat is awesome

Reality is everyone has an email, and everyone will keep having an email. My 10 year old has an email so they could sign up to epic and steam. You basically need it to use the internet at all. So of course it will survive.

Outside of business though, when was the last time you sent an email to someone you know?

It's an ongoing debate in one of the projects I work with if we should move to a more forge oriented development process. For all it's faults email does provide a good record of discussion as well as evidence of review.

asynchronous

Any form of text based communication is asynchronous

You can do it from a terminal. Us Linux kids will never let it die.

I hope the Fediverse will prove similarly resilient.

I need an alternative to gmail for creating new email accounts. Any ideas?

IRC and forums as well to a lesser extent.

Matrix, IRC, XMPP

Also Email is useful and you probably shouldn't waste your time consuming info from people who think otherwise.