Canal Swans #28 - Email Protocol
Even when there’s a sense of a global movement, with the internet its still unclear what other people are actually seeing. The beginning of this newsletter is screenshots of three posts that inspired me (first image, second image, and the third), in part because right now so many different topics, and systems of power, feel connected, and also to express solidarity. The rest of the email is looking at power structures in software specifically, not that these systems and technologies ever really could be separated. The technical details of what follows may seem mundane comparatively, but to me the attention of this mundane architecture is also a form of expression of solidarity.
This past week I was exploring moving this newsletter from Substack to a self-hosted instance of ghost.org, but I ran into some issues with setting up ghost with mailgun (what it uses to send emails).
Ghost.org is a model of software I'm quite inspired by. They are a non-profit and they offer paid hosted versions of their software, while also offering their software to be self-hosted for free by those who choose to. Their writing about their plans to integrate support for ActivityPub is also quite exciting (Newsletter platform Ghost adopts ActivityPub to ‘bring back the open web’).
I first "de-googled" in the summer of 2021, and have been using a self-hosted email hosted with yunohost since then, as well as a self-hosted calendar app. I'm currently using Filen as an an encrypted cloud storage, after switching from Skiff after it got acquired and shutdown.
Seeing Google's connection with the IDF highlighted by @notechforapartheid, it shows the concrete implications of how technology and societal impact are not separate, as well as more motivation to move towards networks and tools without shadow-banning, opaque censorship, extractive monetization, and military entanglement. This might look like choosing a different tool, or just learning more about what's out there.
Email has caught my interest for some time as an early example of an open protocol, but my recent experience with Ghost has also given me more of a sense of the limitations of the e-mail protocol, and some additional reasons e-mail newsletters have downsides compared to new protocols such as ActivityPub and Nostr.
To explain this, here is a screenshot of a paid feature of mailgun, that will let you validate email addresses on your list. “Email validations check if an email address exists and is used by a real person so that you can build a clean list, reduce your bounce rate, and protect your reputation”. The way I understand it now, all this stuff about protecting your reputation, deliverability and bounce rates, is mostly about preventing spam. Something like ActivityPub (used by Mastodon) has a notion of “following someone” built into the protocol, which means a large set of spam considerations of email go away or are simplified — a message from someone you consciously decided to follow should never go to spam or not be delivered. ActivityPub still has other spam and harrassment issues to consider when its used as a sort of “public space”, but following a feed of posts from someone you chose to follow doesn’t have the same e-mail “deliverability and reputation” issues as far as I know.
In 2021, I wrote a poem-like newsletter about e-mail titled “Electronic Mail”, and there are still things I appreciate about e-mail, but I’m now getting more clarity on some of the rougher bits that are mostly due to the time and specific context it came from.
Even beyond e-mail, I don't necessarily think self-hosting, at least in its current form of accessibility, is the best option for most people, but I was recently inspired by some writing by Derek Sivers, that compared learning to self-host as comparable to learning to drive a car – something that takes some initial investment but we do because its worth-while. I was also inspired by the observation that we are all already "system admins" of our smart phones and laptops – these are computers that we take care of. Sometimes this requires taking them to get repaired or some minor debugging – but billions of people have decided to take on this role as a "smart phone system admin". I could imagine something like Yunohost being polished to the point that self-hosting felt more like keeping your smart phone running, than a task for a specialist, although there are also other reasons that individual self-hosting might not always be ideal. In any event, there are many possible alternatives to imagine to the current situation of communication that don’t involve implicitly sponsoring the IDF.
When I joined Mastodon in 2020, I also would not have guessed at the time that four years later Facebook would be joining the Fediverse, but of course the world moves in unexpected and non-linear ways, and various things are connected in ways we may never know. Not that Facebook joining the Fediverse is The Great End Utopia, but its something that reminds me that in a larger time-frame, large changes are actually normal, not impossible. Listening to @wizard_bisan1 its hard not to feel this.