Subj : Re: Community
To   : DustCouncil
From : boraxman
Date : Fri Oct 07 2022 22:26:47

 Du>  pF> If that's the article I think it is, there's a lot of truth in it. I 
 Du>  pF> my  own mail server for about 5 years back in the 2000s, and it was
 Du>  pF> manageable.  Trying to send mail from an ISP's IP block or a VPS
 Du>  pF> nowadays is a pain, and  getting your IPs off of blacklists is extrem
 Du>  pF> difficult.
 Du> 
 Du> Somewhere - it might have been reddit - people were tearing into this
 Du> guy for being technically incompetent, because, well, that is how
 Du> certain kinds of technical people are.
 Du> 
 Du> What should be accounted for is the *sheer joylessness* of hosting a
 Du> server of any sort, if you have anything like a limited number of hours
 Du> in the day *and* you don't particularly get a charge out of running one.
 Du> 
 Du> 
 Du> I like running web servers, but I know a lot of people don't.  I expect
 Du> there are people who like running e-mail servers. I sure don't.  There's
 Du> no hobbyist pleasure in that for me, personally.
 Du> 
 Du> When I ran my own - it was Postfix - they kept releasing updates which
 Du> broke my configuration files, which are byzantine and annoying to fix.
 Du> And then there's the spam issue.
 Du> 
 Du> E-mail, to me, is mundane.  If I could do my own mail service with
 Du> minimal hassle, I'd do it.  But it wasn't minimal hassle. And the
 Du> benefits of doing it myself were minimal anyway.
 Du> 
 Du> I think the guy who wrote that article had his limits, too.  It's not
 Du> that it can't be done, it's that there are a limited number of hours in
 Du> the day and is doing that a good use of your time?  Maybe, if you're
 Du> into it.  How many people are into it?
 Du> 
 Du> What I have found works for me is to own my own domains, and get
 Du> professional mail hosts to just provide service for them (this is
 Du> borderline trivial - they want you to put a bunch of DNS records in
 Du> proving you own the domain, then they take care of the rest).  
 Du> 
 Du> If I become unhappy with a service or they turn out to be evil or
 Du> something, I can just move the address to a competitor, taking the
 Du> domain with me and preserving the accounts.
 Du> 

Agreed, but one should also consider how joyless it would be to have a world where a couple of American companies which are political (politically unhinged I would say), domineering, control e-mail, to the point where you have no option but to use their products, and subject yourself to their monitoring, privacy intrusions and perhaps their censorship.  And not having a choice, you want to communicate to people, you have to use the monopolists products, monopolists who have a business model which by using their product you tacitly support, a business model which is socially harmful.

People seem to have this idea that Freedom IS Free.  That you don't actually have to do anything to be free, it comes default.  That Freedom requires no effort, no sacrifice, and the moment you have to sacrifice anything, whether your time, some effort or even maybe some small convenience, then it is never worth it

I'm not directing this at you, but in general, I find this view that people have quite depressing.  We got into this dystopia, and it is a dystopia, because at each step, people disregarded freedom and autonomy for a little convenience.

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