/rant on I think CloudFlare is the direct result of the enshitififcation of development work.

People write an insecure app in Express/Flask/whatever, deploy it to the internet, then bolt on Cloudflare as a WAF and add Datadog because they have no idea what’s happening under the hood or limited themselves with their up-front choices.

This is marketed as progress. /rant off

But there are valid use cases like you mentioned. And it’s the enshitifed sites that fund that free tier.

There’s some irony about the Fediverse going through a centralized service, but I don’t know of a better free answer. A cheap answer might be a VPS with Caddy and automatic Lets Encrypt, but it’s not turnkey.

“Oh, that’s wonderful. Although I suppose I should mention—I’m acquainted with some people who have artificial intelligence too.”

Even if Illinois was feasible, I don’t think I’d want that. I’d rather fix the system. And quit dancing around the issue of Puerto Rico statehood.

I think it depends what’s on your phone. I don’t use mine for email or banking; it’s 2FA, phone calls, and a map. I’m using a Galaxy S8 that I purchased in the summer of 2017, and I don’t get any updates any more.

If I had bank account information or access to other sensitive data I’d be a lot more concerned.

My biggest problem is apps that stop working. My carrier doesn’t support my phone with their voicemail app, for example.

I’ve been running mail servers for about thirty years; my personal ones and production for 100K+ users.

The personal one is a pain for the reasons you mentioned. I use sendmail instead of postfix, but I was able to use some rules to push certain messages through other relays.

I signed up for Amazon SES and have so far stayed in their free tier. Mail coming from one of my addresses always goes through SES, and mail from any address to certain domains (aol.com, gmail.com, etc.) go through SES as well.

It allows me to ensure delivery for my important mails, but leave things up to chance for less important ones.

It’s the best solution I’ve been able to come up with for a really annoying situation. Big Tech ruined it all.

Children playing in the distance. It brings me back to happy, simpler times.

It’s not the same post. It says above that this is a link to an article because the first one replaced the link with a photo.

Apparently I screwed up my post. When I posted the article here I tried adding a photo from the article, but it just replaced the entire link. I can’t seem to edit the post to put a link back to the article.