While it’s still the global standard for electronic messaging, a lot of people have misconceptions about email. Some say that it’s inherently insecure, but in reality, there’s nothing inherent about email at all. It’s a completely open standard that is continuously evolving and growing, just like the world wide web, roads, human language, and all life on Earth. When it comes to the World Wide Web, usually the web browsers push the standards forward. Most …
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The messaging mess is worse than ever these days. Everyone is falling for the proprietary messaging app scams that always follow the cycle of enshittification. These messaging apps are designed to collect a large user base by being good to them at first, then collect a large base of business customers by being good to them, then taking advantage of everybody for profit. It’s the usual business model these days. But wait, what if we …
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There are hundreds of messaging apps out there these days. Slack is one that has recently become popular for business communications as has Microsoft Teams. Discord is another one that’s become popular with gamers and other consumer communities. These are all, at their very basic level, just “type message, press send” programs. There’s nothing particularly special about that and we’ve been doing it for decades on the internet. Unfortunately, those consumer-friendly products are designed with …
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Many servers in the Fediverse have implemented “private mentions” or “private messages” or “direct messages” in a manner that uses the ActivityPub protocol without encryption. Fediverse server administrators are able to read all of these private messages on the server which means they’re not really private. Some have suggested making them encrypted so that server admins can’t read them, but that poses more problems. For example, who’s responsible for enforcing local laws on the server? …
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UPDATE: Since this article was published, a new server package has been built that’s even better for use with Delta Chat. The new server is called Chatmail and its open-source repository is here. Also see: Using Delta Chat with Chatmail servers for decentralized, open, secure, private messaging. The below instructions are still valid if you want to make a server that supports both encrypted Delta Chat communications as well as regular federated email. If you’ve …
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“Too Long Didn’t Read” Summary: Managing too many messaging apps can cause cognitive overload and contribute to burn-out. It’s smarter to focus on the one system that works with everything everywhere there’s internet and is completely open for you to control and customize on your own within the largest messaging ecosystem on the planet. Collaborative Diversity Type message, press send Global Standard Everyone else is NOT doing it SMS texting is obsolete Using phone numbers …
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