Discussion
People complain a lot about email. I understand - but it's also a modern marvel.
I see what is happening on closed systems such as LinkedIn Messages and Facebook Messages and the results are far worse than our evolving open standard from the mid/late 20th century.
So let's critique to improve the standard but start from the premise of "wow... I can't believe this works at all."
@pavo Wow. Perfectly put. Noting it and saving this tweet for later citation. 😀
@schmudde One major problem is that implementing proper E2EE on it is not really feasible. (Soatok has some great blog posts on this.)
@csepp Yeah. And even adapting the veneer of E2EE is impractical. When I taught at Stevens in New Jersey I made my public key available and a couple of students would send me encrypted emails. And even with a Thunderbird plugin, it was always so cumbersome to use. Specifically - likely - because it was non-normative. That part is just as important as the engineering concern.
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@schmudde email is infuriating until you realise its just paper that can teleport, and each reply is also just paper, and it has all the same strengths and weaknesses of letters written on paper.
which makes it immediately clear why email is so bad at being a groupchat