On Tue, Jan 04, 2022 at 02:20:10PM -0500, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote: > Take a look at what is happening on the Internet. SMTP is dying. Young > people are turning away from it. Many people use Facebook Messenger, > WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, etc. etc. and they are using it: > > INSTEAD OF SMTP. Many people are using multiple applications for different purposes ---- e.g., there are some people who only use Facebook for talking to their grandparents; they might use Weibo to connect with their Hong Kong Student Association (HKSA) Unversity friends that made when attending the University of Illinouis; and they might use e-mail when they are developing the Linux kernel, or for work since that's the contact information that's on their business card, etc. So it's really not that simple. If the success metric is that there must be one messaging app to rule them all, then sure, SMTP has failed. > These 'walled gardens' you are referring to in mocking tones are whipping > SMTP's sorry hide. Many of these 'walled gardens' problem only solve part of the general problem (or are only used for some people's subset of their communication needs). Also, never underestimate the network effects. If you want to communicate with the community which makes up the Soaring Eagle Kung Fu school in Palatine, Illinois, you *have* to use Weibo, because that's where the Kung Fu masters are. If you want to submit patches for review in the upstream Linux kernel, you *must* use SMTP to vger.kernel.org. (If you try to send a pull request via github, you will be ingored if you are lucky, or socially "counseled" about why that's not the way to go if you are not. :-) For other communities, code reviews have to be done via Github, or Gerrit, and not via SMTP. Does that mean that Github is "whipping SMTP's butt"? Well, that's not the language I would use. > The only thing I am proposing that is new here is that the users can choose > their own service provider and talk to people using a different service > provider. ... and that's not new either. Several decades ago, I could communicate with people using SMTP, some of which used UUCP for their messaging neeeds, some of which used BITNET, some of which used used SMS text messages, using e-mail gateways. :-) - Ted
