Alien civilizations? No. No evidence to support this. But alien life form like bacteria and other organisms? Possible, but still, evidence is scant. It’s difficult for some to accept that we are alone but the lack of evidence suggests a very strong possibility that there’s nothing out there.

Unfortunately, no as far as I know. I personally think this should be the answer rather than Defederation. I’m not sure where to make a feature request for lemmy but I’m not sure why this hasn’t been suggested before.

Woah!!! That’s actually quite fast and unexpected. I guess that answers the question of discoverability. The remaining question is then, how?

And can it be replicated to other posts? It would be amazing if anyone who posts a question in google is given a link to lemmy.

It’s not so much as a deal breaker. The green bubbles means you’re using regular text, hence in some countries, there may be big charges as opposed to blue which is kind of like your regular instant messaging where it’s free as long as you have wifi or data.

It is unfortunate that we have to choose between the two. The idea of FOSS should be not paying and not being the product.

If you look at my original post I mentioned I have proton mail. What I wasn’t aware was if there were free providers as in lemmy.world where it’s free, without subscription, or free from any profitization.

It was discussed heavily in the comments that self hosting only brings problem.

I also conceded that there are no free alternatives apart from hosting your own. That’s why I agreed that protonmail is the next best thing. What I didn’t agree with it is its subscription model and hence its lack of protection against being profit-driven.

That too, I conceded. Someone mentioned tildes.team and I may start looking into that next.

Tldr: I understand that there are email providers available but most are still owned by companies, hence there will still be a time when we have to pay for them, as opposed to say, donation and community-driven.

Thank you for explaining. I grew up on php-based forums and websites. So Rust is pretty new to me. TBH, I haven’t heard of it until Lemmy. :)

I agree, the free option is very serviceable as a backup personal email. Though there will always be a part of me that is skeptical if these free services will disappear one day.

That said, I wouldn’t put everything in one basket. As I recall, their VPN is slow and their cloud storage has no mobile apps. Though that might have changed since I last tried the Proton suite.

Oh wow. I didn’t know this was a thing. Will check this out for sure.

They often provide free services to its members such as email, website/gopher/gemini hosting, coding tools, and many other useful utilities.

This has me really really interested. Thanks for giving more awareness to this :)

To be honest, proton is quite expensive for what it gives. Though this might differ depending on income levels and level of comfort. But their free version is serviceable enough if your email volume isn’t that high.

On your last point, no worries. That is a valid point and yeah, that is exactly what I’m getting at. It’s either use a free service that might disappear or pay a subscription.

I think we can do better, as in the same vein of FOSS where the service is crowd funded and funded by donations.

I know there are paid solutions and that’s fine. But again those run the risk of disappearing or charging more or pivoting business strategies. So many things could go wrong with a paid service.

But with a community initiative, there’s more checks and balances and while not everyone contributes, there’s less likely that a service will become worse over time as demands for profit increases.

Hmmm you have a lot of good points. Decentralizing my accounts would be a good starting point. Will need to track more email accounts but then that’s what a good password manager is for.

Yeah I guess. But yahoo, tutanota, proton mail, hotmail, etc. all answer to a company. I was hoping for a more permanent solution which I think could either be

1. Fediverse not requiring email to sign up

Or

2. A community or non profit email service that is not tied to one company but owned by many.

I guess proton mail will be the next best thing but there’s the fear that they too will not remain free forever.

This is what I am afraid of. Because all major providers are companies in the end and they need to make a profit. So there may be a time when we really have to host our own email (not all of us can easily do)

I don’t know, maybe, I am just disillusioned in general that I am starting to look for community alternatives rather than provided by big companies. At least right now we have plan B like proton mail and the rest. But if the trend continues, the pessimist in me fears the time where everyone would have to self host email, or subscribe to a big provider and submit to their rules.

I shudder to think about the idea of emails becoming subscription services though.

I actually didn’t know that. So in the off chance that gmail fails or if it becomes too unbearable to use, the solution is to buy a domain and host your own email?

Yeah, on deeper reflection, Tildes is a wall garden, which in itself could be an isolating experience. A tight control on its users runs the risk of making it an echo chamber just like majority of what reddit used to be.

I’m not a techie but is there inherent pros to being written in rust rather than php? Big forums were powered by php back then (phpBB, XenForo, to name).

By requiring invites, they are already punishing people not the abusers as their philosophy states

Trust people, but punish abusers

By gatekeeping. And making it difficult for people to join, it assumes that everyone is a criminal/troublemaker until proven by a some sort of vetting process.

Reminds me of when malls used to check your pockets for stolen goods before your exit. The assumption of guilt sours the whole experience.

Threads got to me late. The moment it was advertised, I’m in too deep the lemmy hole.

I vaguely recall a discussion on Tildes with that sentiment on tildes. So thank you for the reminder of their blatant elitism.

https://tildes.net/~tech/16bm/beehaw_org_defederating_effective_immediately_from_lemmy_world_and_sh_itjust_works

This one I think. And scrolling through it now renewed that bitter taste in my mouth.