I work in B2B IT support, and email is designed to be very async, and for the most part it still is. What I can say with certainty is that business folks expect email to be instant like synchronous platforms are… It’s not, it never will be… It’s gotten about as close as it can be, but it is not, and will never be, instant delivery, no matter how much they want it to be.
this is your reminder to set up OpenPGP. encrypt your email.
Yeah and I’ll use it with maybe one other of my tech nerd friends
Thousands of years after humanity has destroyed itself with nuclear weapons…
As the sun peeks through the gray clouds and lights up a solar panel…
A long-forgotten server hums to life…
And sends an email…
“Attention Required: Your Order is Delayed”
We’ve been trying to reach you about your car insurance
It’s because it isn’t a silo?
Discord, Slack and a bajillion similar apps do not meld with other apps. Email just happened to hit critical mass before “let’s try to get a monopoly” became the slogan of all tech, and collectively Big Tech is too stupid/hostile to replace it with some cooperative protocol.
iMessage is another pure example of this.
There are tons of open messaging protocols that have been replaced by closed ones. For instance, Discord shouldn’t be a thing since IRC exists, but Discord exists and is very successful.
For some reason, likely tied to how it is used, email survived as an open protocol.
For instance, Discord shouldn’t be a thing since IRC exists, but Discord exists and is very successful.
IRC lacks a massive amount of features that discord users typically want. Screensharing, VCs with group and camera support, built-in history (don’t need to use a bouncer like on IRC), built-in online GIF searcher and sender with one click, huge community of bots that use discord’s API to do anything from games to moderation.
It isn’t even close.
ICQ and AIM managed to draw a huge crowd in the early (ish) days of home Internet.
It’s not about features…it’s about ease of use.
Also, IRC wasn’t as decentralized as email to begin with, there were several isolated networks that would not communicate with each other (dalnet, EFnet, undernet, etc)
I guess that’s why someone decided to build a chat app on the email protocol and infrastructure.
I love that this exists but never have used it.
This is why I kind of hate microblogging platforms. This could just be part of a conversation, but shown of context every post is turned into a soundbite and takes on levels of faux-profundity that they can’t possibly support. Yeah, email has been around forever; so what?
IMAP is useful. POP can crawl back to the bowels of hell from whence it came.
JMAP is apparently the shiny new thing trying to replace IMAP.
It’s why SMS still exists too. It’s from an era where everyone just used open standards instead of trying to create their own thing for money. Big tech conglomerates like we have now didn’t exist. The state of the tech industry and it’s proprietary standards is absolutely fucked.
It’s from an era where everyone just used open standards instead of trying to create their own thing for money.
SMS is literally from a time when every mobile phone manufacturer had their own charger plug. And some tried pushing proprietary headphone jacks.
Vendors LOVE vendor lock-in.
Google is trying to kill SMS. My new android by default has sms disabled, defaulting to RCS with “try sending sms instead if rcs fails to send” option being off by default, which makes no sense from user perspective
RCS is actually a huge improvement over SMS, as it is fully encrypted. One of the few times I’ve ever approved of something Google did…
If only it was an open standard…
It… is? It’s an open standard that anyone can use and implement. The main provider is Google and there has been a huge push from them to get Apple to adopt, which they mostly have. It’s not ‘owned’ by any company. It’s predominantly serviced by Google, but is in fact an open standard. Google and others have their own format which is how they and their apps interpret and interact with each other, but it is an open standard. There are some backend and requirements for it which stops most from setting it up and implementing off the shelf and just going with Google, but you absolutely could use and make your own format with the standard.
It seems like a category error to compare email to Discord or Slack. The latter two are distinct companies and not protocols.
Something could replace it easily if they tried to use the open standards and decentralized system like email has. But tech companies have gone too greedy, they won’t make anything that works with other tech companies. Every one of them are trying to pull users to themselves. Now we have people with account in 5 different websites to communicate with different people instead.
It is sad how far the technology has come. It’d allow so much improvements in quality of life and yet it’ll all being used to extract more money, making life shittier.
Remember when Steve Jobs said FaceTime was going to be an open protocol? Pepperidge Farms remembers.
I still have a weird email friend who refuses to chat over any apps and I totally can respect that. :)
cool of you to keep in contact with them :) i have always wanted to do this but i know it would isolate me and inconvenience others just to communicate with me
asynchronous
Any form of text based communication is asynchronous
For the people, yes.
With email, message delivery can be async as well.
as in the server chats with another
Centralized servers in which 2 users talk can be considered “synchronous” because they get the message nearly instantly, but yea, we often use NoSQL async calls for instant messaging apps
Oh on a technical level yes. But on the surface it’s still asynchronous, as long as you can’t tell whether the other person has read your message (which, to be fair, a lot of messaging applications have as a feature)
Reality is everyone has an email, and everyone will keep having an email. My 10 year old has an email so they could sign up to epic and steam. You basically need it to use the internet at all. So of course it will survive.
Outside of business though, when was the last time you sent an email to someone you know?
My mother uses email for nearly everything. I’m 31 now, but in high school she’d email me from the basement that dinner is ready.
Just last month I received this… we chat on WhatsApp and phone calls regularly as well.
That’s cute. She treats it like writing letters or maybe postcards given the length of the message.
Mail has the big advantage of being totally cross platform. And it works, basically everywhere.
All the application protocols were supposed to be cross-platform! It’s something the corporatisation of the net undermined to an extent
IRC and forums as well to a lesser extent.
Much much lesser. IRC has basically died to successors. Everybody still uses email sometimes.
