LOLBLOG
A „blog“ in 2020 feels like recording on dat tapes. People have flocked from their blogs to Medium and now flock back to Email. Well, no, to Substack, which then asks people to read via Email. It’s complicated.
As an infrastructure system, email is amazing. Email is the cockroach of internet standards. The sad thing is that very little evolution is happening. Except for delta chat or spike, email is still the same: a pile of ugh. If you‘re lucky, your client threads the messages. Inspirational it is not. And don‘t dare to throw encryption into the mix or even user-friendly for non-technical users — it‘s all a nightmare.
All in all, delta chat is so far the best solution in my opinion. It combines the people-based interface we got used to from messaging apps with the fully automatic encryption we got used to from — well, yeah, it‘s basically whatsapp on email minus facebook minus realtime.
Personally I love getting away from realtime, from notifications, from all the bling bling that screams into our faces all day. As I write this, my device is offline and the screen filtered to greyscale and I‘m just sad that there are very few e-ink phones so far.
Oh, there is the other thing: operating systems. I‘m tired of all the big tech. As much as I enjoyed Macs for 35 years, and as convenient as Apple‘s walled garden is — I want back my autonomy! It might take a year or two, but unless unforseeable, terrible things happen, I will slowly and quietly switch over to Linux. A Raspberry Pi 400 is on the way and Elementary has just this week started experimental Arm builds (the same week btw that Brave started experimental IPFS support).
I fear the switch and I am also really excited. Sometimes I wonder I really need more than a terminal and a browser, given I find enough open-source or at least open-API webapps. I will miss Keynote. I will miss iA Writer. But that‘s mostly it. Who knows, it might even be time learn vim. (a sudden coldness hath befallen my soul after typing that… too far… too far…)