A historical review of the multi-decade centralization and capture of the email protocol.

Interesting history and analysis of SMTP’s history. How can we prevent fedi and other open protocols from suffering the same fates?

  • Handles@leminal.spaceEnglish
    2·
    2 months ago

    I know there are problems with big email providers subverting decentralisation to benefit their business models, and throttling mail from independent or self-hosted domains. But I couldn’t take the analysis seriously past this statement:

    You may know me as a Bitcoin educator and engineer.

    Yeah well, in that case, fuck you and the hypercapitalist horse you rode in on.

    • makeasnek@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
      1·
      2 months ago

      You may know me as a Bitcoin educator and engineer.

      Yeah well, in that case, fuck you and the hypercapitalist horse you rode in on.

      This guy is a protocol engineer, talking about protocols. You may not like like Bitcoin, but it’s pretty hard to argue it’s not one of the most successful, widely-used, and forked open source protocols developed in the last several decades. Bitcoin core is in the top 100 starred repos on Github. It has a unicode character.

      Bitcoin’s market cap (> 1 trillion USD) is bigger than Sweden’s GDP and it moves billions of dollars around the world every year. You can use it to send money to anybody with a phone and a halfway reliable internet connection in under a second for pennies in fees, and it settles instantly. And it’s been working for 15 years without a single hour of downtime, bank holiday, or hack despite pandemics, wars, financial crises, and attempted bans by global powers.

      Like, be mad if you want, but it’s a pretty successful and robust protocol. And if you don’t like it, you can fork it and change it, because it’s open source.

      • vrighter@discuss.tchncs.de
        1·
        2 months ago

        http, https, ssh, ntp, ftp. These are all algorithms some of us use every day. Bitcoin is a protocol, true, but it’s not a good one. And it’s one that most people have not used, and don’t intend to

        It has a lot of forks? that is neither here nor there. it’s a tech buzzword. of course there are going to be a lot of forks. Do any of them actually go anywhere though? not really

          • Sethayy@sh.itjust.works
            01·
            2 months ago

            ‘One of the most successful, widely used, and forked protocols’

            SSH is also a protocol, tho I’ll admit maybe its ‘one of the few’ above bitcoin - but I can come up with a page of examples that top it if you need (HTTP, TCP, UDP, RTSP, RGMII…)

    • ___@lemm.ee
      1·
      2 months ago

      Bitcoin is hypercapitalist? A decentralized value store not controlled by any one country and immune to money printing inflation? What are you smoking?

      • Kogasa@programming.dev
        1·
        2 months ago

        Bitcoin is more widely seen as a vehicle for speculation rather than a decentralized currency. Unlucky.

  • observantTrapezium@lemmy.ca
    21·
    2 months ago

    You can’t successfully use a home email server.

    Mostly true (server can be home but using the ISP network directly probably won’t work)

    You can’t successfully use an email server on a (cloud) VPS.

    Bullshit

    You can’t successfully use an email server on a bare metal machine in your own datacenter.

    Bullshit

    As such, it is my distinct displeasure to declare the death of SMTP. The protocol is no longer usable. And as we can see, this devolution occurred organically.

    Bullshit

    • ramble81@lemm.ee
      1·
      2 months ago

      You can’t successfully use an email server on a bare metal machine in your own Datacenter

      Calling complete BS on that. I work in a medium size company and we do just that. Don’t know what he’s thinking.

    • ikidd@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      I’m going to add “bullshit” to the first. I’ve gone 2 decades running a few email domains on my home servers, on 3 different ISPs. Its not rocket surgery.

        • kalpol@lemmy.world
          2·
          2 months ago

          Same here. Static IP though. I did set up another experiment with a haproxy vps just to see if I could do it if I lost my static IP, worked perfectly done that way too.

          Fail2ban, pfblocker, and soamassassin work great.