It is so hard to get an email address without providing an email or SMS verification. Like 9/10 on the internet difficulty scale.
Any site that lets you receive email for example by generating a random inbox seems to be blocked by the more full-featured ones that let you send email. I’ve spent the last week trying to get an email address doing lots of searches and trying to signup for any email address at all without success.
This makes sense if you understand that bots cause problems universally but at the same time the personal information strategy isn’t working. Spammers have no problem getting email accounts and every other kind of account. It’s the honest person who won’t go to the dark side and pay for stolen accounts that is in the worst shape.
Maybe you want to setup your own mail server? Ther you need a domain name and registars want even more information. Many of them give you privacy on your domain records, but this is no defense from the surveillance state.
If as said in the sidebar mass surveillance is about mass control, and not justice, then email is an extremely important technology to start supporting for privacy and freedom.
Spam and abuse are problems to be sure but there must be other ways to solve them than by providing information that links back to the real world.
Now what can we do about it?
See table “Email Hosting market share table” https://www.datanyze.com/market-share/email-hosting--23
Google, Microsoft, and Godaddy collectively control 79% of the email market. You effectively can’t deliver email if they – the first two in particular – say you can’t. So every other provider has to dance to their tune. This is, at this point, an economic problem.
If you want to re-decentralize email, and the web overall, you have to figure out what to do about the increasing concentration of Internet infra into an ever-smaller number of hands. I’m guessing there is not a technical solution to this.
We need dead simple turn key solutions for self hosted services. Simple as setting up a wifi router or some other consumer focused device.
Users get to use networks on terms dictated by their ISP’s. My ISP blocks self-hosted email. They did so because it was not in their interest – spammers were using the functionality to run spam ops. They still allow for self-hosting, but as self-hosting becomes more popular, ISPs’ residential networks are going to become a security minefield and an increasing liability. They will tighten the screws on what people are allowed to self-host and how, or they’ll just make it painful to impossible.
You could do a “self-hosted” turnkey email VPS, I guess, but then the users have to rent and spin up VPS’s. You could run a VPS provider that provides an API to streamline the process, but now you’re positioning yourself to be the next big cloud provider instead of decentralizing the web.
You make very valid points. What do you think is a scalable, decentralized solution to this problem? What if we decentralized ISPs themselves with mesh networks like Althea?
Decentralizing network ownership is the best way to go imho. Start building locally-owned and controlled networks! Then start building connections between them!
Althea is just a cryptoscam like any other. We don’t need cryptocurrencies to build network, we need people who step up, raise funds and build infrastructure. There’s quite a bunch of self-organized networking projects across the planet and it doesn’t take much resources/experience to build one (although it’s better to have on the team at the very least one person who knows their way around a local datacenter / internet exchange point). If you have more questions about it, we can open a dedicated thread :)
Disclaimer: I don’t advocate for any type of scam. I was just using that as an easy example. ;)
Please do. When you say self-organized networking projects, do you mean something like a community owned ISP that provides internet access to the community that owns it?
There’s different models.
guifi.net is a federation of (for/non)-profit ISPs mutualizing infrastructure for all to use
ffdn.org is a federation of small local non-profit ISPs who deploy their own infra where they can and rent it where they can’t ; the ISP is autonomous and owns the network, and all “customers” are voting members of the associations
freifunk.net is a decentralized, self-organized public hotspot network: they provide with router firmware you can setup on your premises to provide anonymous (well, there is authentication but no logs) internet access, where traffic is routed via VPN to a regional datacenter to then reach out to the broader Internet
bandwidth coops like gitoyen.org, which mutualize the cost of transit for smaller peers (transit has crazy economies of scale where smaller providers pay over 100 times the price of a big provider, for 1Mbit/s at the 95th centile)
There’s also other projects such as Rhizomatica in latin america, or optic fiber coop ISPs in rural England, and probably many others, but i’m not as familiar with those. Still worth mentioning is NYCMesh which has a nice map which can give you an idea what infra for a local wireless ISP looks like.
Does anyone have experience with FreedomBox? (https://freedombox.org/)
It looks very interesting…
There’s plenty of solutions like that. Freedombox appears to be stable and well-maintained but doesn’t have a lot of “apps”. Libreserver is more experimental but has strong security features and even an experimental mesh mode (local nodes disconnected from Internet). Yunohost is very popular and has plenty of packages.
There’s also more “pro” solutions for collective hosts. AlternC is a distro used by many hosting coops, ISPConfig is also quite widespread.