Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youā€™ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutā€™nā€™paste it into its own post ā€” thereā€™s no quota for posting and the bar really isnā€™t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many ā€œesotericā€ right wing freaks, but thereā€™s no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iā€™m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged ā€œculture criticsā€ who write about everything but understand nothing. Iā€™m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyā€™re inescapable at this point, yet I donā€™t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnā€™t be surgeons because they didnā€™t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canā€™t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

Last weekā€™s thread

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)

  • self@awful.systems
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    1 month ago

    huh, I just switched to Tuta and thatā€™s a very good point ā€” there isnā€™t even a command line mail client, much less an IMAP bridge. the official word from a couple years ago is ā€œwrite it yourself but we donā€™t support automated emailā€ which is several kinds of wrong

    so far Iā€™m not hating Tuta but itā€™s definitely much jankier than Proton. Iā€™m kinda surprised Iā€™ve heard good things about Tutaā€™a UI compared with Proton ā€” itā€™s faster, but functionality so far varies from somewhat barebones to mildly broken

    no regrets on the switch on my end so far though, but this might come to bite me at some point. I wonder if a dedicated transactional mail provider could alleviate some of the pain? I can DM you a recommendation for a good one if that seems like itā€™d be handy

    • Mii@awful.systems
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      1 month ago

      Thanks, I thought about something like that as well, but figured itā€™d be more hassle in the long run. I like to keep my mail in one basket.

      But honestly, I feel like there just isnā€™t a good solution anyway. Email comes from simpler times and any encryption is bolted on and either awkward to use or has some problems with functionality. Hell, even Protonā€™s bridge was a pain to get running properly with send-email because for some reason it insisted on reformatting outgoing mails. I honestly wonder if I should even bother at this point, because most of the stuff I use email for isnā€™t even private. Itā€™s mostly corporate communication and mailing lists which are public anyway. All private communication goes over other channels (and some of which are arguably even worse than email, like Discord).

      Not saying that this is the conclusion everyone should come to and YMMV, but spending the last weeks combing through the email landscape this feels like the realization Iā€™m starting to arrive at, because I want my email to just work.

      • self@awful.systems
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        1 month ago

        thatā€™s absolutely valid, and Iā€™ve come to effectively the same conclusion: good encrypted email is effectively a different protocol (one which, as of now, is proton-to-proton and tuta-to-tuta only) and should be treated as one. daily unencrypted email is a legacy protocol that can effectively be handled client-side as a different account.

        encrypted mail should be federated, possibly with something like activitypub (though I donā€™t have a good solution for attachments), but every time I float this I get a lot of very angry feedback about how I shouldnā€™t propose a new email standard without solving spam first, whatever solving spam means. some of the people giving feedback then float solutions that are basically warmed-over hashcash and then I stop listening.

        the difference between modern webmail and what activitypub already does is very thin ā€” a lot of it is intent, UI (emailā€™s focused on long messages and potentially long threads), and features like attachments going from best-effort priority to crucial. thereā€™s absolutely room in the world for better email ā€” I just believe that internally, itā€™ll look closer to e2e ActivityPub with something like Soatokā€™s federated keyserver concept on top, rather than the shitty half baked shit we do now to make PGP work with email