Sorry, don't like the name. Also, when you say a reddit alternative, to me it gives the impression that the redditor culture will remain so why would I sacrifice the content rich reddit for a new platform? Federation doesn't mean much to me as a user that justs wants [social]entertainment and news (and commentary on them).
There's only one thing that can change my mind a little: if you guarantee email is not and will never be required to sign up or use a feature. Edit: if you think this is irrelevant, consider how both reddit (until recently) and HN didn't require email for signup, also the majority lurker population and importance of lurker-> user conversion. If email is your hill to die on, it will also be mine and I hope a majority of lurkers' hill to die on against you.
As a techie I support federated and decentralized systems but as a user, how the platorm is architected is irrelevant, my experience is all I care about. Also,how will it monetize? Ads? If so I will stay with reddit. Non-crypto payment? Yeah, crappy reddit is better.
>There's only one thing that can change my mind a little: if you guarantee email is not and will never be required to sign up or use a feature.
I'm not trying to play the devils advocate here, just genuinely curious: Why do you (or anyone else) have such a strong opinion on not using emails for signing up? Usually, when a service requires me to enter an email, I have no issue with using a service like 10minutemail and never checking that email account again.
I have spoken about this many times on HN. It comes down to this: email is being used in many nefarious ways and it is an ancient protocol with many insecurities. Anonymous email works for a bit but then every service worth using starts banning the providers. Both reddit and HN prospered as a result of not requiring email, that should tell you a lot about how horrible it is. It's on the same level as social security numbers being used as a secure secret that identifies a person. Email was not meant to be abusef this way, and I have seen first hand how it can be used against people so I have chosen it as my figurative "hill to die on".
Now, if I can give a limited use address that cant be tied to me as an individual,expires after a period of time and messages are E2EE encrypted with no metadata leakage I don't mind that.
I have spent almost an entire day trying to sign up to one service withour having to give up my phone number,real IP,creditcard or real email address to anyone as a challenge. I have tried countless anonymous email providers and sms code receiving services. I failed. Email abd phone number collection is a modern tech evil for me.
The problem is always 'how do i allow this user to reset their password', or more 'how do i verifiably contact the user'/'how do i verify someone emailing support is who they say they are' - without email, it's completely on the user to know and remember their password, something a lot of people can't do (and most don't use a p/w manager). HN does fine here since it's a 'tech' community where the majority likely does use a password manager, and Reddit gets away with it since their UI is so quiet about the email being optional - almost everyone thinks it's a required field since other websites require it and it looks just like the u/p field.
If you choose to opt out of email then you also choose to opt out of email support and being able to reset passwords via email. Two factor auth solutions let you store a one time recovery code for example that you write down or store somewhere safe, that's one option if you care to support it but I wouldn't mind losing the email only features you mentioned either.
> If you choose to opt out of email then you also choose to opt out of email support and being able to reset passwords via email.
And the users will get mad and blame the service provider. That said users are dumb/wrong or whatever is irrelevant, what matters to the business is that they're pissing off users and getting a bad reputation. Thus, requiring emails from the user is entirely rational and in fact is a good business practice.
No, making it a default makes sense. Users will not get mad if they get a warning telling them email support will no longer be possible. Alternatively you can opt with giving them a recovery code by which they can contact support or with which email will be enabled for an account when the user forgets their password. The only time you can't turn on email on your account is if you lose the password. Email is not secure, a user that has their login compromised is very likely to also have their email compromised. Moreover, if their email is compromised this completely silly dependence on email will get their account on your site compromised as well so you should be using a non-email means of authenticating users for support or account recovery!!
Email must die. No buts or ifs. It must die. You are a poor or ignorant engineer and architect if you build new things that depend on email in 2020.
If you give the most mediocre hacker 100 emails of users of your service that depends on email for account security, I am confident he/she will compromise at least a 3rd of accounts.
>Alternatively you can opt with giving them a recovery code by which they can contact support or with which email will be enabled for an account when the user forgets their password.
This is absurd, you either have an extremely idealistic view of the abilities of users or your thinking is warped by your extreme hatred towards a ubiquitous protocol.
What do you recommend to replace long form correspondence online? I cannot see anything that can replace it currently. Especially not in corporate, nothing beats email.
Thanks for sharing, I'm working on a new convo site called sqwok.im and I've debated whether to ask for email. I ended up with it being an optional field at sign up that's only used to help with account recovery/notifications. Having the ability to generate an account recovery token sounds like a cool idea! You can still chat on the site with only a username/password.
Thanks for sharing as well. I have signed up and I will try to promote your service. Thank you for listening to users. I hope we see more services like this, we've lost too much of the good experience of the old internet.
Thank you! I appreciate you checking it out, I'm @guac. I agree that we've lost the aesthetic of the old net and that we need more choices when it comes to these types of things. I grew up chatting on irc, aim, icq, etc and have fond memories of those times. A neat aspect of current technology is that we can build similar experiences that are now accessible to everyone w/o e.g. "download and install the client, configure the server" (most ppl have no idea what you're talking about). The goal is to create a simple, frictionless, open chat site that lets ppl talk about news/current events/etc with no hassle. Admittedly I'm a news junkie and started building this because I want to use it myself!
hey badrabbit, was thinking some more, I'm interested to know what other aspects of "the old internet" you are missing? feel free to reply or email me guac@sqwok.im, cheers!
>email is being used in many nefarious ways and it is an ancient protocol with many insecurities
Yes. But this doesn't make it a bad protocol to use. Email is one of the best things that remain for individiuals who value their privacy. It's pretty much the only popular messaging tool that doesn't require a phone number and isn't tied to one vendor.
>Both reddit and HN prospered as a result of not requiring email
This is untrue. HN and reddit prospered because users wanted to use the service, not because they don't require email to set up an account. If you have any evidence that suggests otherwise, please tell me, I'd be very interested in resources on that topic. To contradict your point: Pretty much every other website, regardless it it's a small one man operation or a giant company require email or even a working phone number, and those seem to be doing just fine.
>Email was not meant to be abusef this way
Well, how is it "abused" in it's current form? It's electronic mail, so people use it as such
>and I have seen first hand how it can be used against people
And how would that look like
>Email abd phone number collection is a modern tech evil for me
You should strike email from that list. Phone confirmation is the real problem, because it is tied to your identity in most of the western hemisphere now. However, there's still plenty of serious email providers where you can start a trial account to sign up of whatever requires it, just don't use the usual blacklisted expiring address suspects. I can highly recommend mailbox.org, they provide a very good service and have a 30 day trial period for new accounts.
Yes it's actully like that. Those services get blocked but why do I have to use a third party when you can just make emails optional. If many users dont feel comfortable giving up their email, just make it optinal. You cant expect my support when you don't care about forcing me to jump through hoops because you don't care about my privacy preferences.
I'd genuinely be curious as to some statistics about how many users do feel strongly about using an email / generating an email. I get that you feel that way, but to what extent is it a common feeling?
People don't trust companies who want an email address. You get extra spam, the company or their successors and partners sell the email address, poorly secured computers and cloud nonsense almost ensure it'll be stolen, and nowadays if you have an incorrect opinion you could easily be doxxed, even by people inside of these big tech companies and startups.
You may not care about these issues, and you might have the correct opinions for now which don't irritate the tech overlords. But lots of people have learned the hard way that providing an email address is, at the very best, going to result in spam. At the worst? You could be physically assaulted, lose your job to an outrage mob...
It makes the spam irrelevant as you never see it, it makes it being sold irrelevant as again, you never see it. It can be stolen and nobody can tie it back to you.
This isn't 2003. Bots are litetally backed my humans that sit all day creating bit accounts. There is an industry behind bypassing simple things like this. Why cant bots register a million domains are receive a million account registration emails?
Is paying in crypto that much of a feature for you? Honestly curious about it.
I have been working on hosted Mastodon/XMPP/Matrix and I would definitely consider adding Lemmy to my list of supported services. If I can get authentication via LDAP for it, even better and quicker.
The one thing stopping me from a bigger announcement is that I am yet to finish my crypto payment integration. If you are indeed interesting in something like this, can I reach out to you once it's ready?
I pay 3x the price for protonmail just so I can buy crypto at an inflated price with cash and pay for my email. Yes it is critical for me. I and many others are willing to pay up for a service that respects our privacy and asks for consent before selling us out.
You cannot after a while. You have to rely on that service not being blocked for registration and i would also need the anonymous email service to not require email,cc payments or phone number. Either way, they dont need email to provide a service and the karma/voting system stops bots. If I can easily register anonymous email and signup,so can bots so whats the point? To make me jump over many hoops and hope i make a mistake? Just to prove a point ? Make privacy a difficult task so normal people wont bother and leak enough info to be used against them? No thanks, you don't have my support.
I made a new reddit account until recently and still could register without email, when it asks you for email you can just press continue without providing an email.
There's only one thing that can change my mind a little: if you guarantee email is not and will never be required to sign up or use a feature. Edit: if you think this is irrelevant, consider how both reddit (until recently) and HN didn't require email for signup, also the majority lurker population and importance of lurker-> user conversion. If email is your hill to die on, it will also be mine and I hope a majority of lurkers' hill to die on against you.
As a techie I support federated and decentralized systems but as a user, how the platorm is architected is irrelevant, my experience is all I care about. Also,how will it monetize? Ads? If so I will stay with reddit. Non-crypto payment? Yeah, crappy reddit is better.