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?
as others said the concept of email is already pretty good. But if you’re worried about your data, simplest solution is to stop relying on free email services where you are the product (like google) and start paying for services whose business model is privacy (like proton).
proton offers email, vpn, password manager, file storage, and calendar.
other companies also offer parts of that if you dont want to rely on the same company for all of it.
obsidian offers local, secure, and encrypted sync notekeeping.
For everything you mention there is a company who offers it, and who’s business model is providing a good and secure service for a fee, and not “free”(paid by your ad profile).
Im possibly just really cranky from allergies so apologies if Im out of line, but this gives the impression of just wanting free crowdsourced solutions, instead of looking into the viable paid solutions that are already out there.
On your last point, no worries. That is a valid point and yeah, that is exactly what I’m getting at. It’s either use a free service that might disappear or pay a subscription.
I think we can do better, as in the same vein of FOSS where the service is crowd funded and funded by donations.
I know there are paid solutions and that’s fine. But again those run the risk of disappearing or charging more or pivoting business strategies. So many things could go wrong with a paid service.
But with a community initiative, there’s more checks and balances and while not everyone contributes, there’s less likely that a service will become worse over time as demands for profit increases.