So sad what has become of xmpp federation. I fondly remember a merry day long ago when I had a roster full of people chatting to me on different services over xmpp. These days I mostly end up using email, irc, or text messaging.
ಠ_ಠ
I thought we were moving into the future, one second at a time, but it seems not, with all our communication moving into proprietary services and imprisoning it, which I will not accept as our future.
Yeah. In late winter Google finally stopped federating with my xmpp server. I had friends asking my why I blocked them because to them everything appeared normal, but now I never appeared online to them - must be me blocking, right? It’s still disrupted my social relationships, much less spontaneous “hey, let’s go X” happening.
Sorry fastmail but you are making a big mistake. It might make business sense now but guess what? Those big players are also slowly locking down mail. Should I treat you the same the moment gmail/facebook decides that they don’t really need to allow the fastmail servers to send messages to gmail/facebook users?
Starting to feel like email is just a curiosity of history – what happened back when academics ran things. I suspect it will last for a good bit longer because of its ‘primary ID’ status it got sort of by default, but I can’t think of another federated success since then… :(
I don’t think email really has a good value proposition. It’s very widely deployed, which is nice but is not a long-term advantage. By design, an email address is a bearer token: anyone who has yours can send you mail, without demonstrating anything else about who they are. That means it’s always going to have a spam problem.
I don’t mean to suggest that a generic notification service, or a modality for long-form answer-later communication, are bad things that should go away. But when you look at it like that, there’s really no reason either of those has to work the way email does.
Thanks. I am not involved in anything like that, and there’s no transcripts so I can’t really determine what the conference is about, but there’s definitely a comparison to be made between email and mobile/browser push notifications. A notification isn’t, by itself, a message… in that to the user, it has no enduring existence; most types of notification have no browsable or searchable history. But in many cases, both are clearly filling the same need: There’s some existing business relationship and something about it has changed, and the user wants to know immediately. I don’t think things we have today really explore the design space very thoroughly, but it’s gotten interesting recently.
I think that happened a long time ago when we allowed spam to become such a huge percentage of total e-mail traffic. Now the protocols and systems in place are so widespread that changing them is too difficult, which is why we see users moving to different (non-free) messaging mechanisms and congregating around centralized services like Gmail which can arbitrarily cut out the small e-mail senders in the name of fighting spam and nobody really does anything about it. Users view e-mail as just that thing that you get your password reset sent to, or where your Amazon order confirmation goes. When they really want to reach someone, they use Twitter or Facebook or iMessage.
Perhaps one day spammers will reach a rate of return so low that they won’t even bother anymore, but I doubt it, especially since phishing is still available to them.
If spam is unsolicited e-mail, then Facebook or Google are already available to spammers, because I did not solicit any ads they put on my screens daily.
Spam is much cheaper than even the cheapest of legit ads. I’m sure the price per eyeball has gone up in the past decade, but when I last looked at it, it was tiny fractions of a cent for each mail that actually made it to someone’s inbox (already a vanishingly small percentage of total email sent).
Should I treat you the same the moment gmail/facebook decides that they don’t really need to allow the fastmail servers to send messages to gmail/facebook users?
Yes; if a service is unable to perform its primary function, it’s time for it to die. If we lose, then why should we keep unused code on life support? That’s why we need to fight to re-open email. It’s far too hard to set up an independent mail server and actually have it send mail.
We really need to find a good way to handle reputation and spam filtering in a distributed way, without needing a server to sit around for years accumulating enough reputation to send to gmail.
It’s certainly true that email is not as decentralised as one would hope. I have my own mail server, and even when relayed through e.g. SendGrid, the percentage which gets marked as spam automatically by recipients on big systems like Gmail/Microsoft is huge. :|
So sad what has become of xmpp federation. I fondly remember a merry day long ago when I had a roster full of people chatting to me on different services over xmpp. These days I mostly end up using email, irc, or text messaging.
ಠ_ಠ
I thought we were moving into the future, one second at a time, but it seems not, with all our communication moving into proprietary services and imprisoning it, which I will not accept as our future.
Yeah. In late winter Google finally stopped federating with my xmpp server. I had friends asking my why I blocked them because to them everything appeared normal, but now I never appeared online to them - must be me blocking, right? It’s still disrupted my social relationships, much less spontaneous “hey, let’s go X” happening.
Sorry fastmail but you are making a big mistake. It might make business sense now but guess what? Those big players are also slowly locking down mail. Should I treat you the same the moment gmail/facebook decides that they don’t really need to allow the fastmail servers to send messages to gmail/facebook users?
It’s sad that we lost another fight.
Starting to feel like email is just a curiosity of history – what happened back when academics ran things. I suspect it will last for a good bit longer because of its ‘primary ID’ status it got sort of by default, but I can’t think of another federated success since then… :(
I don’t think email really has a good value proposition. It’s very widely deployed, which is nice but is not a long-term advantage. By design, an email address is a bearer token: anyone who has yours can send you mail, without demonstrating anything else about who they are. That means it’s always going to have a spam problem.
I don’t mean to suggest that a generic notification service, or a modality for long-form answer-later communication, are bad things that should go away. But when you look at it like that, there’s really no reason either of those has to work the way email does.
Interesting that you mentioned notifications there as I heard about this ‘conference’ lately: Notification Summit http://techcrunch.com/2015/10/16/notifications-summit-session-1/
Thanks. I am not involved in anything like that, and there’s no transcripts so I can’t really determine what the conference is about, but there’s definitely a comparison to be made between email and mobile/browser push notifications. A notification isn’t, by itself, a message… in that to the user, it has no enduring existence; most types of notification have no browsable or searchable history. But in many cases, both are clearly filling the same need: There’s some existing business relationship and something about it has changed, and the user wants to know immediately. I don’t think things we have today really explore the design space very thoroughly, but it’s gotten interesting recently.
This is my worry as well. The values that email embodies are in danger of being lost to the sands of time.
I think that happened a long time ago when we allowed spam to become such a huge percentage of total e-mail traffic. Now the protocols and systems in place are so widespread that changing them is too difficult, which is why we see users moving to different (non-free) messaging mechanisms and congregating around centralized services like Gmail which can arbitrarily cut out the small e-mail senders in the name of fighting spam and nobody really does anything about it. Users view e-mail as just that thing that you get your password reset sent to, or where your Amazon order confirmation goes. When they really want to reach someone, they use Twitter or Facebook or iMessage.
Perhaps one day spammers will reach a rate of return so low that they won’t even bother anymore, but I doubt it, especially since phishing is still available to them.
If spam is unsolicited e-mail, then Facebook or Google are already available to spammers, because I did not solicit any ads they put on my screens daily.
Spam is much cheaper than even the cheapest of legit ads. I’m sure the price per eyeball has gone up in the past decade, but when I last looked at it, it was tiny fractions of a cent for each mail that actually made it to someone’s inbox (already a vanishingly small percentage of total email sent).
Yes; if a service is unable to perform its primary function, it’s time for it to die. If we lose, then why should we keep unused code on life support? That’s why we need to fight to re-open email. It’s far too hard to set up an independent mail server and actually have it send mail.
We really need to find a good way to handle reputation and spam filtering in a distributed way, without needing a server to sit around for years accumulating enough reputation to send to gmail.
I have seen some people lose interest in configuring/securing their server properly after Google or Microsoft accepted their messages.
Damage is already being done, because we are not clever enough to use a decentralized network correctly, or prefer the commodity of “free” services.
It’s certainly true that email is not as decentralised as one would hope. I have my own mail server, and even when relayed through e.g. SendGrid, the percentage which gets marked as spam automatically by recipients on big systems like Gmail/Microsoft is huge. :|