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
    8·
    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.

    • ___@lemm.ee
      11·
      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
        2·
        2 months ago

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

    • makeasnek@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
      11·
      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
        3·
        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…)