this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2026
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"Nostalgia" is not really reserved for great times, just different times. Is just reminiscing.
In addition, AIM was great at the time because it was the first "messenger". It was instant without the clunky and slow interface of email that for some reason we continue using 30 years later. It's not better in any way.
Email is actually great, it's the original fediverse - anyone can start a server and interoperate with everyone else. With a decent client it doesn't need to be clunky either, although with 90% of people stuck in webmail I can understand why people think it sucks.
It's not great at all. It's messy and disorganized and confusing and very much not private, and people don't use it properly. No client can fix that. If it was "the original fediverse" we wouldn't need a new one.
So exactly the same as the fediverse we're on then?
No. Not like that at all.
Well nothing is private on lemmy. Or piefed. And it's pretty confusing for normies, more so than email. I see a lot of similarities.
Privacy is not a binary concept. Lots and lots of stuff is private that isn't on other platforms. Email only isn't confusing for normies because they learned how to use it.
Kinda hard to have anything private here without end to end encryption. You COULD use GPG in PMs, but then people have been encrypting their email for decades too.
And with email you don't generally have to keep up with instance politics to know where to sign up to be able to email the people you want to email. So I'd still say email is simpler to use. Maybe not simpler underneath on a technical level, but that doesn't matter to the end user.
Not hard at all. It's as simple as not collecting information that isn't strictly necessary to run the service.
Dont have to do that here either.
Only guaranteed if you run your own instance
Yeah, there's this thing called defederation. You could lose access to communities you've been actively posting in, etc.
Fair.
You think email doesn't have defederation?
Broke ass 70's tech, but whatever
They literally said in the opening sentence: "the best thing about early internet wasn't AIM or MySpace"
The post isn't about individual technology at all, but how relationship with technology changed.
Yes I literally also read the OP. I'm not sure what that has to do with my comment.
So...its about technology?