A farewell to email

Posted Oct 18, 2018 18:17 UTC (Thu) by flussence (guest, #85566)
Parent article: A farewell to email

I honestly can't say I'd miss it if it went away — my distro runs its forums on phpBB, which is *fully* usable in every browser. I can fire up /usr/bin/links from a CD and look up documentation, or ask for help with hardware troubleshooting. By comparison I don't know any distro that puts a working mail client on its install media, and on top of that it needs a pre-existing account. If you're using a silo like GMail, it's becoming increasingly impossible to even authenticate using a standard mail application.

That's not to say mail infrastructure doesn't have any use, but it only seems useful for people already heavily invested in long-term participation and willing to deal with the spam problem. Some projects don't have enough of that demographic left to justify the upkeep costs.

A farewell to email

Posted Oct 20, 2018 20:51 UTC (Sat) by creichert (guest, #128045) [Link]

> there are various email notification mechanisms for new topics and such, and users by default get handy notifications every time somebody "likes" one of their posts.

I'm not sure if the author is making an explicit point with this line, but I've built a personal habit of aggressively trimming notifications and completely disabling all "like", "share", and alerts that I can't or won't act on.

I'm not saying it's pragmatic to recommend this for new users, but it's a
an effective system that allows me to maintain my focus, reduce overall noise in my inboxes (mail or otherwise), and handle higher volumes communication.

To the point, I appreciate services that allow me the option of using Email *or* their web interface seamlessly so I can reduce context switching as much as possible.

Take communication over GitHub for example:

When I'm in my mail client and come across a pull-request, issue, or discussion, I can choose to reply from the email or browse the URL and continue a discussion from the web client. Thus, I can reduce context switching and fragmenting my attention.

> As others have often said, what we need is a modern replacement for email — some sort of decentralized solution that preserves the advantages of email while being suitable to the 2018 Internet

I'm certainly not opposed to this argument, but it seems that the alternative system vaguely proposed is just like email, with a web interface, and less SPAM.