I have been using email for 40 years. It used to work.

As an (independent) academic researcher, I need to contact new people, primarily in universities, to ask questions.

I refuse to use Google, Microsoft or the other American IT giants.

But they are increasingly preventing refuseniks from sending email at all.

I know what RFC, DNS, MX, SPF and DMARC mean. My email goes through small British companies with intelligent, friendly and helpful staff.

mxtoolbox.com says that I must have DMARC to send email to M$. So I set it up. I now get a dozen copies of the same report from G or M$ for each email that I send out.

They show that my email gets to G and M$ sites, but then it is marked as spam.

The stupid senior management of numerous universities has surrendered their staff email to M$.

Web searches and AIs preach about spam. I don't send spam - I want to contact my colleagues.

Rumour has it that previously unknown senders are treated with suspicion and their emails are sent to spam. In other words, it is impossible to **initiate** communication with someone.

Let's be blunt about this. They are a mafia that is enforcing an **oligopoly**. It's got nothing to do with reducing spam --- I have no doubt that they let through emails from "trusted partners", ie companies that bribe them enough to send their spam.

The result of this is that it will only be possible to send emails by paying M$ to do it, and then it will only be allowed to express "approved" opinions.

What can we do about this?

At the very least, those of you with senior positions in universities can tell your management to revert to competent standards-based email systems hosted on Linux systems.

"What I wanted was a [Fediverse] client that runs in a plain browser, handles images properly, but does not require a JavaScript engine to display a list of posts.

So I built SmolFedi.

It is a PHP application. No npm, no Composer, no build step. It uses a SQLite database and PHP sessions. Every page is generated server-side and sent as plain HTML. It supports multiple accounts, timelines, notifications, polls, media attachments with alt text, content warnings, compose, reply, boost, favourite, everything I actually use day to day. There is not a single line of JavaScript in the codebase."

https://adele.pages.casa/md/blog/the-fediverse-deserves-a-dumb-graphical-client.md

In France, we don't say "vibe-coded contribution" but "merde request" and I think it's beautiful 💩

#AISlop #ChIAsse #NoAISlop

Got another mastoscold yelling at me for "using the platform to promote" my photos.

For the record, I don't generally sell my photos, here or anywhere else. But even if I did, I fail to see why that would be a problem.

Preventing artists from making a living is a strange hill to want to die on.

Alguien por aquí recomendó en su día Localsend y me da mucha pena no recordar quién fue porque tiene mi agradecimiento eterno.

Es lo mejor del mundo para compartir archivos entre distintos dispositivos que estén conectados a la misma red wifi.

https://localsend.org/

#localsend #opensource #filesharing