The talk about “enshittification” made me think of the very email we use for the instances we signed up and instantly, it paints a grim picture. One of my account used gmail to sign up. Some proton mail. It reminds me that these too are companies beholden to their shareholders.

Is there a fediverse answer to email? Like what mastodon is to twitter and lemmy is for reddit?

If not, maybe the fediverse can think about allowing email-less sign-ups?

As an addendum, what about the popular tools we use in our daily lives? The calendar, note tools, etc all are products of companies driven to maximize profits.

There’s a talk in the technology sub about how GitHub was acquired by microsoft and I’m willing to bet that it’s not the only popular tool that was or will be endangered of disappearing or turning worse in the name of profit.

Is there a community movement that can somehow mitigate this? Or is there really no choice for us? Is there a complete list of FOSS somewhere that are at par or at least only mildly worse than the popular mainstream ones?

  • james@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    Before I knew the word federated I always wondered why all these social media platforms don’t work like email.

    Government officials use government controlled email accounts, but then use “government” twitter accounts. Never made any sense to me. 🤷

    • CharlesDarwin@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      My word, yes. This.

      Ever since the 90s, I’ve wondered this about IM. IRC is good for many uses, but too complicated for many, so all these private options popped up, and continue to still be with us instead of an open protocol for IM. Jabber/XMPP tried to do it. Matrix, too.

      And yet, we still use all this cruft like Slack and Skype and so on.

      IMHO, nearly every other type of communication should figure out how to do it like email, including IM and microblogging and Reddit-like things.

      Maybe Space Karen might end up actually resulting in innovation and adoption of good tech, but just not in the way that he had planned. XD