Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)
Personal rant: in my ongoing search for a replacement for ProtonMail after they pivoted to AI had me almost sign up with Tuta because, hey, they looked good and were on my radar originally anyway, when I found out that they do not offer any IMAP/SMTP access at all.
I mean, I get it, their whole thing is privacy and, yes, storing mail locally on my machine kinda undermines the idea of strong and impenetrable E2E encryption, but I should at least have the choice like I do with Proton Bridge. Because without SMTP Tuta is completely unusable for
git send-email. I mean, yes, technically I could copy-paste the output offormat-patchinto the web client but, first, I am lazy and donāt wanna do that, and second, from my experience it rarely works anyway because the clients do some encoding crap so thatgit amdoesnāt eat it without cleanup.Meh. I guess I have to keep looking.
huh, I just switched to Tuta and thatās a very good point ā there isnāt even a command line mail client, much less an IMAP bridge. the official word from a couple years ago is āwrite it yourself but we donāt support automated emailā which is several kinds of wrong
so far Iām not hating Tuta but itās definitely much jankier than Proton. Iām kinda surprised Iāve heard good things about Tutaāa UI compared with Proton ā itās faster, but functionality so far varies from somewhat barebones to mildly broken
no regrets on the switch on my end so far though, but this might come to bite me at some point. I wonder if a dedicated transactional mail provider could alleviate some of the pain? I can DM you a recommendation for a good one if that seems like itād be handy
Thanks, I thought about something like that as well, but figured itād be more hassle in the long run. I like to keep my mail in one basket.
But honestly, I feel like there just isnāt a good solution anyway. Email comes from simpler times and any encryption is bolted on and either awkward to use or has some problems with functionality. Hell, even Protonās bridge was a pain to get running properly with
send-emailbecause for some reason it insisted on reformatting outgoing mails. I honestly wonder if I should even bother at this point, because most of the stuff I use email for isnāt even private. Itās mostly corporate communication and mailing lists which are public anyway. All private communication goes over other channels (and some of which are arguably even worse than email, like Discord).Not saying that this is the conclusion everyone should come to and YMMV, but spending the last weeks combing through the email landscape this feels like the realization Iām starting to arrive at, because I want my email to just work.
thatās absolutely valid, and Iāve come to effectively the same conclusion: good encrypted email is effectively a different protocol (one which, as of now, is proton-to-proton and tuta-to-tuta only) and should be treated as one. daily unencrypted email is a legacy protocol that can effectively be handled client-side as a different account.
encrypted mail should be federated, possibly with something like activitypub (though I donāt have a good solution for attachments), but every time I float this I get a lot of very angry feedback about how I shouldnāt propose a new email standard without solving spam first, whatever solving spam means. some of the people giving feedback then float solutions that are basically warmed-over hashcash and then I stop listening.
the difference between modern webmail and what activitypub already does is very thin ā a lot of it is intent, UI (emailās focused on long messages and potentially long threads), and features like attachments going from best-effort priority to crucial. thereās absolutely room in the world for better email ā I just believe that internally, itāll look closer to e2e ActivityPub with something like Soatokās federated keyserver concept on top, rather than the shitty half baked shit we do now to make PGP work with email