Hi. Nice write up. Throwing in my two cents.
I would not kill e-mail, only because it is still one of the few distributed messaging protocols out there which is common. I agree with you about the privacy and security issues - and I think about email as a fully public medium (think public mailing lists and so on). Totally unsuitable for second factor and private (1-1) communication though.
Sadly the only way this will change is if more services accept truly decentralized authentication AND they ALSO can implement moderation and spam control that can work with this. So for those of us on the technical side this means contributing for open source projects (e.g. lemmy, etc) with:
- authentication back ends for TLS client certificates (if gemini can do it why can’t HTTP? browsers used to support this)
- good moderation tools to prevent abuse that can work with such authentications - this means avoiding storing state on the service for a “sign up”; it can also mean implementing proof of patience/work e.g. a long time ago there was this for HTTP https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-sporny-http-proofs-01
Getting these two things right is hard work. You have implement somewhat annoying things in your interface like 1) your account only becomes active after X time or after approval 2) proof of work or rate limiting of posts, etc. But ultimately this already happens anyway in current systems, it is just opaque (and based on your IP/email/phone).
On another front, communicating privacy compromises about these things is really hard, imagine drawing a big fluxogram with a rule set for someone to follow
- talking loudly in public -> e-mail/
- … (insert your chat medium here - with analogy)
- for really private conversations 1-1 -> SimpleX
- everything else is rubbish and we have no idea what they do, assume someone is reading over your shoulder
I think there is one thing that we systematically get wrong - we continue to create tools that do both direct messaging (1-1) and large groups which causes people’s expectations of privacy to be wrong (e.g. end to end encrypted means nothing in a group chat w/ 1000 people and public access).
Finally for fun and laughs, try saying no when someone asks for your email/phone - behave like you have neither. Malicious compliance works wonders with this, give them their number as your number.
PS: I am going to steal this quote of yours “imagine paying to have your privacy disrespected” about phones. Hell I’m making t-shirts and stickers.
Looks cute - internally it sounds like XMPP rosters if we imagine all mail messages/attachments are pulled too.
Some issues at a glance
I think there are some gaps on the notification side of things - the agent not being able to verify them (and maybe dropping) or conversely accepting notifications that it should not.
What really puts me off here is the unnecessary use of HTTP .e.g discovery moves from DNS to well known file (webfinger?). Not sure what the benefit is, but ok. And the use of a novel authentication scheme makes me nervous.
It was a nice read and I agree with the point that making this pull based helps. But I wish it did not try to invent so much in one go