After weeks of Microsoft bouncing every mail our server sent to any of their mail properties (due to, I guess, some history on the IP before we owned it), I have begun to doubt the premise that no one owns email. The major providers can make your mail server useless to 20%, or more, of email recipients. That's a pretty big club to wield. (I understand why a mail provider would block, and I've instituted IP-based blocks on my own mail servers in the past. It's just that email is such a mess, and there's not a good way to solve it.)

But, I would love it if RSS made a huge comeback. Twitter, facebook, Instagram, etc., I'd love it if I didn't have to open any of them, but could still follow my friends posts. There's no technical reason for them to be walled gardens, only business reasons, which are at odds with my privacy and general happiness.

> There's no technical reason for them to be walled gardens, only business reasons, which are at odds with my privacy and general happiness.

Then pay them! Hosting fees are not gratis.

Where should I sign up for the "privacy-respecting, no-advertising" facebook plan? Twitter have one of those, too?

Nope, but google is trying. See google contributor and youtube red. Start there.

Google Contributor looks neat, and probably something I'll try out...but, I don't see any indication that privacy will be respected with their plan. Seems like I still need an ad blocker and a privacy-respecting web browser.

It's unfortunate that something like Contributor can't be done in a peer-to-peer fashion. It requires a huge player with a visible impact on their entire web to be able to "sell" a different sort of web experience. That's actually kinda scary; it reminds me how much power Google has. While I have vaguely positive feelings about Google (and use gmail, Android, etc.), it's not great that one entity owns such a big chunk of the web.

I already have a couple of subscriptions to services that provide music. I don't know if I'll switch to Red; might try it out at some point. I should read up on it; I do watch a lot of tech videos and such on YouTube, and if Red actually supports the people who make them, that'd be great.

Youtube Red and Google Play Music come in a package, which is actually an awesome value. Red does support the creators whose videos you watch.

Not OP, but unfortunately Google Contributor is not yet available in my country. Google really seems to be focused on the US and only on the US.

Yes. I am constantly telling people to switch to email after having contacted them on Facebook, WhatsApp and Quora. It would be nice if there is some enforced standard to exchange personally written information. Why not return to email? Perhaps upgrade email, for example by using utf-8? I have no idea, however, how to create a compatible upgrade path. This would be my wish: Someone should create a feasible upgrade path to email and create a standard which all mayor player have to follow.

I asked somewhere here, if there is a way to extract the email addresses out of Facebook (or Twitter), of friends etc. Apparently there is no solution (probably because these locked walled-gardens do not allow such extraction, even when you have first layer of trust established, i.e, I am only talking about extracting the email addresses of friends on Facebook).

So the gist is, that it is not really technically easy to have people move back to email's personal communication. I gave up on Facebook and I am not on any of these other social networks. I'd rather just communicate with people via email or personal text.