Was about to comment on this but you got right to the point. All of this is because people are lazy to build, let alone maintain, their own damn programs and servers.
I have more money than time. Take my money to do things I do not have time for. What you call lazy, I call time and capital/cashflow efficient.
(cloudflare customer, in both personal and professional capacities; i pay Fastmail to host family email; both can easily be switched if needed to prevent lock in, with DNS changes and in the case of hosted email, an export of mailboxes and tenant config)
What GP is effectively saying is that you don’t value independence enough to invest the necessary money and (for personal use) time into self-hosting.
And there is a spectrum to this. For example, using a small, independent email or hosting provider may cost a little more time, but makes you more independent from big tech, and maybe more importantly, contributes to reducing the power of big tech. We are all paying for it, down the line.
This is a fallacy, as self hosting means you remain at the whims of receiving or interfacing systems. Does you hosting your own email change the concentration of email accounts hosted at Yahoo, Microsoft, and Gmail? It doesn't. Does hosting your own domain or website change Cloudflare's concentration and centralization of internet traffic? It doesn't. You vote with your dollars by picking providers who won't lock you in, you vote with your dollars by picking protocols over platforms that cannot lock you in.
Paying Fastmail, along with others who do so, means Fastmail will remain as a non Big Tech option, for example (they also developed and championed, JMAP, for a more efficient user experience). Paying Kagi means Kagi will remain as a non Big Tech option. Donating to Let's Encrypt means Let's Encrypt will remain as a public good independent of Big Tech. I could go down the list of every service I pay for to de-Google and de-Big Tech, but that's likely unhelpful to further demonstrate the point.
> We are all paying for it, down the line.
Indeed, so establish and fund organizations that provide systems and services for benefit vs profit and control that cannot be captured. Self hosting your own box at home helps you (which is totally fine and reasonable, I run my own on prem infra across two continents at small business enterprise scale for use cases I cannot procure commercially at reasonable cost), but does nothing else, and doesn't scale.
You will still be required to hand it over, or sit in jail while your confiscated, inventoried equipment is processed by forensics. If I want to be subpoena proof, I’d host the subject system outside the jurisdiction with an org having no connection or nexus in the adversary jurisdiction. Admittedly, this is up to your threat model. Do you want to know, but still be legally required to provide access? Or do you want to be out of reach entirely? The answer to that will guide your implementation and operating model in this context.
Why do you mind that? Your life is exactly the same one way or another. Principles, I guess, but it looks to me its just for the sake of it. For me, time is precious, all I need is data safety so I backup stuff offline constantly.
Citation requested. Big tech considers your IP address dishonorable, and blackholes your emails. How independent are you now when you can't email any providers that use blacklists?
> contributes to reducing the power of big tech
Again, citation requested. Big tech will just blackhole your emails and you'll only find out when your users complain.
Everyone says this about self hosting email but I've had fewer problems self hosting email than any other service - though I don't use residential IPs I use dedicated servers or VPS. I've also seen plenty of comments from others who selfhost email whose experience matches mine.
I also see a lot of comments from those who have admittedly never tried, telling me that I'll be blacklisted and not even know.
I don't know if this is some kind of confirmation bias, or if there's just a very vocal bubble of people without experience talking about how difficult it is.
A lot more people and organizations would self-host email if it wasn't a minefield. It's not laziness that Google and Microsoft have effectively decided nobody's allowed to do that.
I was part of a team ran EMail services for a ~15,000 person campus of a ~80,000 person university in the late 90s and early 00s. It was a full-time job for a team of people to keep things running, up to date, control spam, etc. It was a minefield 25 years ago! Literal years before GMail was a thing.
I was obviously not talking about end customers but businesses. In my case, digital content creators should just do that - create digital content. They have no reason to tackle hosting, payments, access rules... as that is not their business. It's mine.
Is this even true for such a sensitive subject like email where there are insane blacklists/whitelists everywhere in which you are forced to use a middleman either way so your emails enter someone's inbox?
yeah I ran one for a while for myself and couldn't peer to any of the major email providers because they dont trust random email servers on the internet
What's the problem? GP is addressing a market need consistent with their comment above. I wouldn't be surprised by a auto mechanic stating that (too) many people are too lazy to change their oil - they might be the best person to manke that observation, given their PoV.
Yes, this guy's business is that. And it is MY business, not my customers'. If you do not understand the nuance of what I am saying, rather keep your thoughts to yourself as you portray yourself in very ignorant light.
