Post
I'm very disappointed to discover that a self-hosted Ghost can't actually send out newsletters by email.
It provides all the front-end for accepting subscribers and promising them new posts by email, and it's all turned on by default. But to send those emails, you need a paid account with a proprietary mail missile called MailGun.
EDIT: Not really Team Ghost's fault, see below.
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@strypey maybe my list isn’t big enough, but my posts send with a simple inexpensive paid act. I haven’t had to hook up a mail service in addition. Very small list, though. I opted to drop substack even if it would have been both free and easier to get subscribers. I tried several services and Ghost has been much better than a lot of them
@zannesan Sounds like you're using Ghost.org. Which pays the protection money to MailGun on your behalf. Us self-hosters are on our own, and I only learned about that after setting up my Ghost instance and migrating everything from SS.
No regrets, I didn't have a lot of subscribers from SS anyway. But if I did, and especially if a bunch of them were paying for regular posts? I'd be pretty grumpy right now.
@strypey ah yes, that’s right. I used to self host on Wordpress and had to pay for mail services. Much much worse experience. Bummer. It’s probably why substack is so sticky despite the Nazi crap. Unfortunately, money rules the day.
Turns out that if you send more than about 50 copies of an email by standard email (SMTP server), you'll get blocked as a spammer by all the major email hosts. Even if you have the receipts to prove active opt-in.
So the only way to get more than 50 copies of an email to their destination is via a cartel of proprietary mass mail senders (Service-as-a-Software-Substitute).
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@strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz I wonder if you could get around this using PGP? Since each recipient's copy would be encrypted with a different key, the body would look completely different to the server each time.
Unless it's just based on frequency/timing...
@pup
> I wonder if you could get around this using PGP?
Good thinking!
> Unless it's just based on frequency/timing
That could be a factor. But in that case, couldn't you stagger delivery? Walk without rhythm and you won't attract the worm ; )
But if enough spammers do this to be annoying, it will eventually attract the worm anyway. I think a protocol-based approach to proving opt-in is probably a better long term solution. See last post in the rant.
This enshittification of the once fully-federated email network is something we have to rabidly resist coming to the ActivityPub network.
Imagine if you could only deliver your fediverse posts to more than 50 people by using one of a cartel of post sending "services". Which you have to pay for the privilege of getting your posts to the people who follow your account.
Hmm. Sounds familiar. Isn't making you pay to speak to your own audience something FarceBook is infamous for?
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Side note: This is one of the things that worried fediverse veterans about the architecture of BlueSky's ATProto;
https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/
You can only get your posts from the PDS where they live, to the AppView of the people following your account, via Relay. If a Relay is something only a Titter-sized company can afford to run, there's only going to be a few of them. Which means they too could eventually form of a cartel and erect paywalls.
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Fortunately the BS folks seem to have taken the criticisms on board, and done a lot of work to bring down the resource costs of running an ATProto Relay;
https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3lo7a2a4qxg2l
Which is another strike against the potential for enshittification of BS. Good stuff.
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I still wish Ryan had stuck to his guns and kept BridgyFeb opt-out. So I could just interact with BS folks from my Mastodon account. Instead of having to set up an ATProto PDS to do it without the added friction of the opt-in dance.
But as with the decentralisation of ATProto Relays, the solution is probably having more bridge instances. Ideally one for every fediverse service whose community wants full social web interop. The MHOA can't brigade them all.
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Coming back to the original topic, can we emulate the decentralisation of ATProto Relays in the field of mass email sending? So self/community-hosted Ghost instances don't need to pay protection money to get emails delivered to subscribers who've opted in to receiving them.
I'm thinking of an automated system where Bob clicks the link in a subscription verification email, and that sends a token to the email host approving mail from the address that will send newsletters.
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A space for Bonfire maintainers and contributors to communicate
