this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2024
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Imagine a future where every home user can run a FreedomBox or something similar with decentralized services like email with your own custom email domain, XMPP and more. No more exploitation by commercial companies.
π
Itβs a nice thought but if everyone were to manage their own email server (and other things) we would have SO much more security problems in general.
I spend a not insignificant amount of my work week now dealing with quarantined or bounced mail from other companies that can't or won't set up DKIM, SPF, and DMAC properly. Not individuals, companies, with IT departments.
You'll never get most people to properly manage their own server.
Prolly cause their I.T. is Ian Trevor, a guy who knows how to boot up the mail server box.
This is true.
And it's a problem with email itself lacking a native security infrastructure.
I don't know what the answer is - maybe less reliance on email? But then it would have to be supplanted by something else.
Seems like we're still in the developing phase of all this stuff.
Email grew during a time when connectivity was sporadic. I'll check my email when I get connected. So store-and-forward.
We still need the store-and-forward capability, but we now rely on instant delivery.
Then there's the conversation vs letter idea, files/attachments, etc.
Corporate systems try to combine it all, which makes sense. No reason to move files about, instead have a repository and send coworkers links to the files since we're all part of the same infrastructure (it's a database after all).
If we look more abstractly at the major functions people use, there's largely messages (ad-hoc, one-off), conversations (something like messages, with group management, longer-term chains, etc), data sharing (files, images, video, preferably links so people retrieve as needed), meta-data (say contact info, business info, location data, etc), and who's know what else I'm missing. Designing system/s to manage all ti's while being extensible seems the big challenge.
To go full circle on this, even if everyone self-hosted this same repository/messaging platform, we'd need some kind of federation capability, with security and trust management.
It would be interesting to see any research on this from Microsoft (and other groups, universities, FB etc) - their R&D org really knows their stuff. I'd like to see the high-level, abstract, major categories of elements.
Look at systems like QNAP that allow you to host cloud features from your home. Email or text a link to your file hosted on your NAS! Photo sharing features. Very nice! That said, constant security issues. Now your NAS is pwned.
Oh, you can do something like this today, but not with a mature, security-focused, federated product.
I'm kind of building something like this for friends/family, but it won't be generally exposed to the world, it'll be isolated on a VLAN, with no access to my home net. And it'll have a secure front end accessible only via a VPN.
Not something for the average person to do.
That used to be a thing until everyone started drooling over cloud based services, which I never trusted but time marches on and services for the masses are much needed.
Is FreedomBox made by Bluesky?
FreedomBox exists since years. Maybe BlueSky social copied the FreedomBox logo :(