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Comment by qqj | Hacker News Reader

Side note on emails in-general: talking to my younger colleagues it seems that email is going away. We all, me included, prefer to use chats like slack for work and recreation (see discord) and email is used mostly for registrations and getting spam. It’s an obsolete format.

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Mail is the lingua franca of online communications. It isn't going anywhere any time soon, if only because it it's an independent standard that does not rely on some single commercial entity to continue operating it. That is also part of the reason why all those other services still fall back on email for their registration mechanisms.

And the Mediterranian Lingua Franca also faded away. I tend to agree with the person you're replying to, 95+% of my email is automated things sending it, it's rare that I have an email conversation with anybody these days. I don't like this trend, because I value open standards etc., hell I still use IRC regularly. But its use as a person-to-person communication mechanism is definitely falling, in my experience. Also, most mailing lists I'm on have been steadily drying up for a several years now.

I'm sure for some people that is the trend. For others, email is still doing just fine. Personally, I don't much like the kind of proprietary message board applications that trade off locking up your communications in someone else's system for using a prettier UI. Almost any individual online communication that I care about, whether personally or for business reasons, is done either via email or via some sort of self-hosted system that isn't trying to replace email. And speaking only for myself, I have had many email conversations catching up with old friends online while we can't meet in person because of the virus situation. YMMV, and presumably so will a few billion other people's. :-)

Makes me sad to read things like this. Slack and Discord are centralized, someone else owns your identity and you cannot do anything about it. With email (and Matrix) you have the chance to own your identity (by having your own domain).

I think we need to do one better. Relying on a domain/instance/provider doesn't cut it long term, and you either host your own, but it's hard to personally commit to maintain it non-stop for the foreseeable future, or you pick a reliable instance. Centralized silos are generally very reliable instances, (see: gmail).

Not being able to move elsewhere is a lock-in issue (Matrix has an issue for decentralised identities [1]).

I don't see why we couldn't just attach our identities to a private key. Encrypt that private key and back it up on various online providers (using PAKE so that they never see it). Use those to authenticate elsewhere. Designate one, or multiple, providers as a temporary mailbox (rather: ask them to fetch content that you are a recipient of from a DHT). People would identify you with pet names they assign to you. You could publish your key in multiple places (in my HN profile, for instance).

I think of a DHT rather than a blockchain, because blockchains don't scale. Your user account could itself be a blockchain, though, stored encrypted in the DHT.

Not sure why I haven't found such a system yet? Secure scuttlebut seems to come close, but I mostly want an authentication and message passing system, that e-mail could be re-built upon, and bridged with.

[1]: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/issues/915

I'm young and I really dislike slack. Sure, I agree email is shit but it is by far the best tool I have seen for this type of messaging. (Collaborative documents like Google Docs or Dropbox Paper being the other major async communication tool I value).

The major problems I see with slack and similar is that it is too easy to lose messages. If I click a channel, but get distracted before I can properly read or act on it, the message is effectively gone forever (unless I remember, or the next time I happen to open the channel). No other medium has the explicit "delete" (or archive or whatever) that email has. I find this way way way more useful than the "read" concept. Because read means nothing to me, even if I actually did read it (not that it was just present on my screen for a couple of seconds) it is incredibly likely that I forget about it.

Other things I like about email: - Multiple clients let me use email how it works for me. I can control how it notifies me, how it sorts my messages and everything else I care about. Slack is ok, but I don't really believe that one size fits all. And I'm not sure that it even fits many people. - I can send an email to anyone. I don't need to invite them to my workspace or channel or anything. Just enter an address and it is off.

> The major problems I see with slack and similar is that it is too easy to lose messages. If I click a channel, but get distracted before I can properly read or act on it, the message is effectively gone forever (unless I remember, or the next time I happen to open the channel).

If you push Command-LeftArrow (on Mac) it's like a back button for Slack channels.

This doesn't solve the problem. If I forget that I had a message I need to act on I'm not going to remember to go back. The problem is that slack is "done by default" where as email keeps it in my inbox until I explicitly say I'm done.

marketing/newsletter email devalue the format, and in my family most stopped to care about a "inbox". Hundreds of images tucked away on an IMAP server, uncatalogued - far from ideal.

A chat-view in email clients could counter the development, if messages from contacts have visual advantage over automated email. The Ivelope client was featured here before, but went quiet. DeltaChat tries to do it, Chat-over-IMAP is another campaign of vendors.

Problems like mailbox size, search and indexed view of attachments/content, expectations on privacy.. this friction will remain from a user perspective.

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