If you find that unthinkable, consider the bubble you might be living in. I appreciate that there are people that require a decentralized service for messaging and understand where they're coming from. I don't deny their existence. I simply think their numbers are much smaller than they appear on nerd message boards.
I highly doubt that's true. Email is pretty essential to the functionality of the internet, from signing up accounts to getting notifications, to just plain discussions with professionals. It's pretty much the only thing that does what it does.
To use non-nerd examples people in my life have done recently via email: contacting the school registrar's office, updating insurance information, discussing minor problems with a recent surgery with their doctor. Especially for people with anxiety issues who have problems on the phone, email is a life saver.
I lived off email when buying a house through a builder last year. Everyone went through email and nothing else was even offered in many cases. The builder, bankers, lawyers, electricians, everything was email.
I still believe email will outlast all the current solutions though, but the crushing presence of a few big providers is not doing any good for the protocol.
https://i.imgur.com/Fp2LLCg.png
Annual per-capita mail delivery is down 50% in the US since Y2K.
I still receive all my most important communications through the mail box, including anything related to administration, voting, my landlord, invitations to major life events, bank details, etc.
Now if you hope to kill email, you gonna have to remember that.
* Email remains important for middle-class Americans because it's used for business. But that is a small subset of the whole population, including very large numbers of Americans.
* For almost all those users, email might as well be a Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft product.
* Every year, the number of people and businesses that rely on email gets smaller --- in the last 5 years or so, by something like 15%.
There's no trend we're looking at that suggests that email is becoming more relevant.
We should be happy about this, not freaking out. Even if you think the future is decentralized messaging protocols (I like decentralized too; I just think we should figure the nuts and bolts out before we decentralize), email is a boat anchor holding us back.
If that's true then where's that stat from and how are these businesses getting contacted online?
There's no decent replacement for email in that department at all to my knowledge.
I've done most of my non-B2B communication with businesses over the last year or so via FB messenger, Twitter or phone.
Bolting on decentralization works about as well as bolting on security.
What's considered reliance? What's the name of some place that stopped using email? I can see a drop in businesses that are running their own email, and that outsourcing maybe represents a big shift in terms of how they see it as "not critical and must be kept in house" but I don't know that they rely upon it much less.
How are these businesses messaging and communicating?
* You have to use one that is not economically or legally dependent on a jurisdiction hostile to you.
* There can never be many different centralized messaging systems that are economically viable because that requires network effects.
As a result, there will always be a large number of people who will not be able to find a centralized system that protects them reliably.
Middle class Westerners (not only Americans by any mean) that are doing business are also pretty much the only ones that are willing to spend money on written communication. E-mail might not be on the rise, but I'd guess it grosses way more money than all IM platforms together.
> Every year, the number of people and businesses that rely on email gets smaller --- in the last 5 years or so, by something like 15%.
Are you sure that's not just the spam decreasing?
If he claims something, he should be able to back it up with something else than his so-called "authority".
Say Gmail goes down (forever), will people use another of their emails? Or register for a new one somewhere else? Or start using another medium of communication alltogether? I assume all of the above will occur to some extent, but if that system was centralized, only the third option would be available. And if that centralized system was so good that it had killed all competition, then suddenly no one would be able to communicate.
It's not about the amount of people who scream for decentralized solutions. It's about the alternatives available in case something does go down, and how easy those alternatives are for users to adopt.
You don't understand the problem: if you rely on a service like this, two things can - and by the laws of probability, will - happen:
a, a centralized service goes down and suddenly no one can talk to nobody b, you're unable to send a message to someone and never realize it
Imagine if there was _one_ ISP. One single mobile provider. If it goes down, it goes down everywhere, for everyone. Not fun.
As for b, I can't remember, but there's a term when a provider let's you post but it won't get show to others. They can also alter messages - see the Whatapp signal implementation issues that certificates can be silently re-issued.
You are, unfortunately right though: very few of us realizes how important this is. Thankfully the smarter elders of the internet seem to do. https://www.decentralizedweb.net/