A farewell to email

Posted Oct 17, 2018 0:32 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
In reply to: A farewell to email by ejr
Parent article: A farewell to email

It's likely that these areas will mostly disappear with the new satellite technologies coming online...

A farewell to email

Posted Oct 17, 2018 1:08 UTC (Wed) by ebiederm (subscriber, #35028) [Link] (6 responses)

Having everything centralized on one server with no easy way to replicate it is a long term maintenance concern. The less data that needs to be stored the easier it is to replicate. So while people isolated to low bandwidth links may decreasing being efficient and distributed is still a good thing to be.

I recently had a trip and I really enjoyed the fact that I could quickly access all of my mail archives with public-inbox running on my laptop. So like being able to clone a git code repo locally, having a local repo of discussions has real value.

A farewell to email

Posted Oct 17, 2018 1:31 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (3 responses)

Discourse has an API that can be used for replication, so perhaps it makes sense to standardize it.

A farewell to email

Posted Oct 17, 2018 2:21 UTC (Wed) by wahern (subscriber, #37304) [Link] (2 responses)

It doesn't make economic sense for any dominate service provider to standardize--because competition, because move-fast-and-break-things, etc. Standardization, if its to happen at all, has to happen *before* there's a dominant market participant, and there need to be forces that necessitate continued, substantial compliance.

HTTP is so low-level as to be irrelevant in terms of leveling the playing field and permitting novel and useful composition of services and data. SMTP is really the last remaining protocol of its kind in terms of federated, structured content sharing.[1] If this generation *isses it way, then they'll deserve the future they get.

[1] SMTP is far from ideal and has plenty of problems, but that says more about the horrendous state of affairs than it does about its utility.

A farewell to email

Posted Oct 17, 2018 3:13 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

There’s no dominant player in the public collaborative software.

A farewell to email

Posted Oct 17, 2018 4:47 UTC (Wed) by mtaht (subscriber, #11087) [Link]

Email's death started with reverse dns being required and ipv4 space running low. In the 90s, your ISP still asked "do you need a /29 or /27 with that?"

Then, complexity, spam,

Then bufferbloat made async transfers bothersome.

Then the cloud.

Then the lack of working ipv6.

Now the lack of static ipv6 along the edge.

I thought with ipv6, everybody would get a /48 with their house. I was so wrong....

I still have a perfectly usable ipv4/29 here that I dare not use for fear of bloating the link...

A farewell to email

Posted Oct 17, 2018 8:01 UTC (Wed) by mjthayer (guest, #39183) [Link] (1 responses)

> Having everything centralized on one server with no easy way to replicate it is a long term maintenance concern. The less data that needs to be stored the easier it is to replicate. So while people isolated to low bandwidth links may decreasing being efficient and distributed is still a good thing to be.

> I recently had a trip and I really enjoyed the fact that I could quickly access all of my mail archives with public-inbox running on my laptop. So like being able to clone a git code repo locally, having a local repo of discussions has real value.

I vaguely imagine a protocol for storing discussions and other things as e.g. a git repository, and sets of tools for interacting with them (but a simple text editor being enough in a pinch). People who preferred the web way could use web tools on a server and never know it was git underneath, perhaps one could also also interact with it using an e-mail based server in a way which felt like mailing lists. As something git-based it would be easy to replicate and store locally.

I am sure that if it makes sense it will already exist somewhere. That said, what must have features of modern code hosting environments would definitely not fit into that model?

A farewell to email

Posted Oct 17, 2018 17:05 UTC (Wed) by me@jasonclinton.com (subscriber, #52701) [Link]

Yes, it does exist. This is SSB https://github.com/ssbc/secure-scuttlebutt but it has a long way to go in terms of managing the kinds of things that forums can currently do. There are a number of frontends for SSB now but it's still very hard to use and most of the protocol features for moderation tools mentioned in the article are absent.

A farewell to email

Posted Oct 17, 2018 13:09 UTC (Wed) by ejr (subscriber, #51652) [Link] (13 responses)

Not really. There still is a bandwidth issue simply because of spectrum, and the companies still will cap total transfer at a tiny amount (relative to web pages, large relative to email). And then there are those pesky astronomers who would like to keep using their radio telescopes.

A farewell to email

Posted Oct 17, 2018 19:34 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (12 responses)

I'm thinking more about https://www.cnet.com/news/how-spacex-brings-starlink-broa... - it should solve the low-bandwidth problem.

A farewell to email

Posted Oct 17, 2018 23:36 UTC (Wed) by excors (subscriber, #95769) [Link] (7 responses)

According to https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/11/sp... and other articles, it sounds like Starlink aims to offer "up to 1Gbps per user" (at 25-35ms latency), with a few thousand satellites that each do around 20 Gbps, costing around $10B total.

That's not going to allow a constant 1Gbps per user, unless you charge each user about $100K. It might support 1Gbps bursts but the numbers suggest it's going to have to have usage caps that are maybe dozens or hundreds of GBs per month. But at least that should be plenty for web browsing, it'd only count as low-bandwidth for people who want to watch Netflix in 4K from the middle of nowhere.

A farewell to email

Posted Oct 17, 2018 23:58 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (6 responses)

You also don't need constant 1GBps per user to read Discourse forums.

A farewell to email

Posted Oct 18, 2018 0:17 UTC (Thu) by ejr (subscriber, #51652) [Link] (5 responses)

You may be surprised how many web sites fail with satellite latencies. And the promises of low-orbit relays have been there for a long time. No one has made them economical.

And some of us old fogeys do disconnect sometimes still while working.

A farewell to email

Posted Oct 18, 2018 3:07 UTC (Thu) by mtaht (subscriber, #11087) [Link] (2 responses)

I got myself a 36' sailboat last january, as a self gift for rfc8290. It is remarkable what happens when you consciously try to restructure your life without constant internet access.

It's really hard. It's realllly hard for the next gen, too. No referents. They've *always* been online.

Initially, we found ourselves staying close to shore just so we could stream music... and I now have an email/nas server on board, but the cellular usb stick I have is just terrible, so I just "suffer" without email and haul a hard disk around...

But offline, offshore, is a good - perhaps the last place! - place to think long deep thoughts and deal with the dopamine addiction. I've done some good writing here... but to keep that nas up I should add a solar panel... and maybe cut a deal with a hotel off my favorite anchorage for some high speed directional wifi.

Play with a diaspora pod, too.

A farewell to email

Posted Oct 18, 2018 4:36 UTC (Thu) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]

Checkout Secure Scuttlebutt and other decentralised communications options. SSB for example even works where email cannot; over USB sneakernet.

https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/

A farewell to email

Posted Oct 18, 2018 14:41 UTC (Thu) by mtaht (subscriber, #11087) [Link]

If we are to resurrect offline capable store and forward protocols like nntp and email...

...we're gonna need a bigger boat.

A farewell to email

Posted Oct 25, 2018 15:02 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (1 responses)

> And some of us old fogeys do disconnect sometimes still while working.

And some of us - with what many would consider a GOOD internet connection (I have a 17Mb ADSL-2+ connection) - regularly get disconnected at peak time because our local uplink (the nearby British Telecom exchange) seems to get overloaded.

A decent, working, always-on, internet connection is somewhat of an unattainable luxury for many of us, even those living in big cities (London, hey, don-cha-know).

Cheers,
Wol

A farewell to email

Posted Oct 25, 2018 22:11 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

*Especially* those living in big cities like London, full of youngsters who were weaned on the Internet and more or less have it wired into their brains, loads of aging physical infrastructure that is really hard to upgrade (dig a new tunnel in London and expect to take years at it and probably uncover a plague pit or two) and lots of tall buildings to fubar mobile reception and make any attempts at municipal wifi slow at best.

The middle of nowhere is also difficult: I'm writing this from an isolated forested valley covered by a 20CN exchange (one of a few dozen left in the country) which is full, so no ADSL for me, only satellite internet. But hey we don't have municipal sewage or gas either and even the POTS phone line tends to go down surprisingly often. I guess we're lucky to have electricity :)

Medium-sized UK towns seem to be better off.

A farewell to email

Posted Oct 23, 2018 12:34 UTC (Tue) by dbnichol (subscriber, #39622) [Link] (1 responses)

Interesting, I hadn't heard of that. I worked for the company that made both the other satellites that are referred to in that article, ViaSat and HughesNet. They have very reasonable bandwidth, but indeed there's not a lot you can do to get over the fact that physical link length is really long to a geostationary orbit.

That said, I don't know how you'd do high bandwidth communications on a non-stationary orbit. So much of the link quality is dependent on the alignment of all the antennas in play to get the best possible gain out of them. The worst case link (which is what you have to design to) at the edge of that coverage must be much worse than at the peak. I guess it's just another degradation parameter. People have been doing LEO communications forever.

A farewell to email

Posted Oct 23, 2018 23:32 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

The subscriber devices will have a small phased-array antenna and active tracking. The complexity of these devices is going to be stunning, but it appears to be doable.

I can’t wait to be able to work from a mountaintop in South America.

A farewell to email

Posted Oct 27, 2018 15:01 UTC (Sat) by patrakov (subscriber, #97174) [Link] (1 responses)

No, spacex won't solve anything. Their satellites will be perceived as a threat by countries like China and Russia whose governments require censored internet. They have willingness and resources to just shoot down those unauthorized satellites.

A farewell to email

Posted Oct 27, 2018 19:52 UTC (Sat) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

Want to make a bet?