this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2023
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Mastodon

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Decentralised and open source social network.

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[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 year ago (6 children)

If email were invented today people would complain about how complex and annoying it is to sign up.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

OMG another account?! Why can't I just use my discord smh

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Using your email address as username is a common problem for a lot of users.

Some of them are even completely shocked that they can use a different password and don’t understand, that their mail is just their login credentials for this specific site.

The feature “login with Apple/Google/Facebook” exists for a reason.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (5 children)

In college I had to write a program to send emails. This was around 2012. Basically we had to send the low level commands of an email for it to go through. After doing this I realized something weird. The email gets to say who it is from. There are obviously ways to sign the message and verify it and most email servers block messages that don't have these because of how trivial it is to fake. It's basically like putting a name tag on that says "Joe Biden" and everyone believing you're the president.

I didn't do anything malicious but I did mildly prank my girlfriend. I don't remember what I did but I'm pretty sure I told her before I did it. I really didn't want to end up getting expelled for """hacking""" so I didn't do anything remotely bad. The irony is the assignment wouldn't have worked and been as interesting if my campus had the proper security measures to block the messages.

It could be that the web client for our email mentioned something about the sender being unverified and not to trust it but I don't remember.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I sent my gmail address an email from [email protected] and it worked.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Basically we had to send the low level commands of an email for it to go through. After doing this I realized something weird. The email gets to say who it is from.

I remember realizing this and thinking it was weird too when I was reading about SMTP. Specifically, the MAIL FROM command.

Also related.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Spoofing email is hilariously easy. GPG signing really needs to be made easier

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Most orgs have an internal SMTP server that will accept and send mail to other internal addresses without any special authentication or validation. It's almost essential for automatic monitoring software and that sort of thing.

Where the barriers go up is at the border to the Internet. And thank goodness, just a couple decades ago it was sheer chaos.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I was on the school network, so maybe they accept ones from within and reject ones from outside.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

When it was invented, it was complex and annoying, even by today's standards.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Still is if you’re not using a product like gmail or outlook that auto enters all of the incoming and outgoing servers.

How many of us have spent time on our ISP’s help page trying to find the damn STMP server domain?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

For a small period of time I was a god that would bless people with gmail invites lol. That brings me back. I remember compuserve and Hotmail but I don't remember them being especially complicated at all. Maybe that was before my time...? Which would be nice for once

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah, email existed long before GMail/Hotmail.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Tell me more about the before times oh wise one

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Back in my day, we had to deliver each packet by hand! In the snow, uphill both ways!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Hotmail was already the easy-mode stuff.

Before that you'd get your email account provided by the ISP, and before that you'd have to find someone who ran an email server and ask nicely for them to make you an account.

And regarding ease of use: The reason why e.g. SMTP is human-readable is because in the early days SMTP wasn't the protocol that your email client used to talk to the server. It was the email client.

You'd just telnet to your server and type in the SMTP commands manually.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Saying that times have changed doesn’t negate the fact that times have changed.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I don’t get the email analogy.

People did and DO complain about setting up email. ISP email is a great example of this. People forget their IMAP and SMTP address configuration stuff all the damn time. Always have.

I used to do home IT, and I had to help people through that crap constantly.

That said, these days people have gravitated to clients like gmail or outlook. Those push the user onto a certain domain, which makes setup dead simple. This is what mastodon.social is doing now. Making it so people don’t have to think about the instance at sign up.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah I agree email kinda sucks. But everyone still uses it, and (as far as I'm aware) people aren't writing articles about how confusing email is for people and why that makes it a failure. Mastodon and Lemmy are, in comparison, much better and way less confusing but you see that said all the time about them.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

When email came out the alternative product was the post office or a fax machine. Even though configuring a client was difficult for some, instant digital messaging communication was new. It was a BIG motivator for people to either figure it out, or hire someone like me to figure it out for them.

People are comparing Mastodon to Twitter, a fairly similar core product. The gap between email and mail was much wider.