> We're going away from open, federated, distributed standards and back to closed, wall-gardened, proprietary, massive identity providers.

I'm not. I just create an email and password for each site I use. A password manager means that's not a big deal.

EDIT: I meant to say I create an account based on email and password. I don't actually create a separate email address per site.

I create an email for every site. I can recommend it.

Do you do this programmatically? Or with the +suffix@.... trick?

Neither nor. I have my own domain. Every website gets <website>@mydomain. Every email @mydomain gets forwarded to my primary email. As simple as that.

+1. I've been doing this for 20+ years. Every site I register gets a new account following a pattern <prefix><site>@mydomain.com.

Incredibly helpful to track who leaked your email and to whom, better control spammers, etc. Just checked on Have I been Pwned, and I have 30 emails from my domain there [1]. Anecdotally, there's at least another 50-100 email addresses that I get spam regularly, so HIBP is a small subset of all the leaks.

Easy to implement. I use G Suite with Gmail[2], but it works with most other providers.

[1] https://haveibeenpwned.com/

[2] disclaimer: I work for Google, but not on G Suite team, and I pay for the service on my own.

Yeah, the + trick is not that great, because it is quite obvious what your real email is. This way, not so much. One could of course still guess that you are using this trick when they see that your email matches their domain name. If you're paranoid about that, you could of course just use <random string>@yourdomain for every login. And store that in your password manager.

Anything at a custom domain that doesn't look direct to an individual (e.g. not [email protected]) is a big hint to spammers that the owner uses a catch-all and thus any address will get the job done. I suppose you could go with a whitelist for every random address you give out and blacklist the ones that misbehave, but that's a lot of work and, since every company misbhaves these days, including entities like banks, you'll likely miss emails you actually need.

I don't care much about spammers. The filter at FastMail is good enough. What I care about mostly is to make automatically correlating my identity between different websites harder.

> you could of course just use <random string>@yourdomain for every login

You could also use the hash of the domain name with a secret salt value. Then if you somehow lost your login info, you could still figure out what your recovery address was if you still knew the salt.

Nice! Another domain owner here. Never thought to have a sink-all mailbox. Thanks for sharing.

I used to use this trick, but got sick of fighting the bulk spam sent to admin@, postmaster@, etc. the filters got most of it, but damn it was annoying whenever they changed tactics and a small flood would sneak by before being identified by the filters and further spam prevented.

That's why I moved from maintaining my own mail server (with spam filter and activate sync) to a provider. I still own the domain and have a catch-all configured for per-account mail addresses on a subdomain with the mail going to bulk folder on my primary IMAP. The subdomain also prevents the dumbfire admin@... spam.

Only spam I get is on leaked addresses.

Instead of using <service>@, sign-up with <service><secret>@ and forward only the messages that match *<secret>@

Add the email to a virtual address config file.

> We're moving in the wrong direction.

The thing is, too often do people lament the loss of federated/open systems and quickly jump on a blame train spanning the users who "are making the wrong choices by not using the 'obviously better, open systems' and the corporations who 'push their evil walled gardens onto users'".

But few people actually think about what is actually causing these shifts. Users don't usually care about open vs. closed, and seldom care about ideology. They want their shit to work without hassle, to look good, to achieve what they want.

I see so many people blaming users and companies for moving away from IRC, onto systems like Discord and Slack. Why you gotta blame the consumers when they are merely switching to obviously better alternatives? IRC is not a suitable replacement for Discord today, and systems like XMPP and OpenID are massive fucking messes. They don't get used because they're too hard to use. Usability is a feature.

Honestly, I think proprietary solutions win so often because they value pragmatism by nature, whereas open solutions tend to value ideology. Sometimes, you have visionaries at the helm who do value pragmatism and you end up with the best of both worlds. Torvalds is an excellent example: He produces pragmatic, open software and his way, although not "ideologically pure", has done more to promote free software than Stallman ever has.

Not to point fingers; I definitely know there are Stallman-wannabees floating around the site who are in it purely to feel superior to others, and be able to wag their finger and make fun of those using "crass, proprietary software". They don't try to understand why consumers use the proprietary solutions (they can't try, because they refuse to use them). And at the end of the day, the needle hasn't moved.

Anyway, all that to say, we're moving in the wrong direction because too many people cling onto the systems that have obviously lost (openid and IRC) without considering why consumers use oauth2 and slack. It's armchair lamenting.

I have this strange feeling while reading your comment, as if you would respond to the tragedy of the commons with, "Isn't it great! We should get rid of all the commons!"---even though the result would be materially worse.

Open, federated systems are possibly, arguably, better, both in terms of ideology (or alternative, more specific terms like "privacy") and (maybe) technology. But, as you say, users don't care about open/closed, they don't care about ideology, they don't even care about technology. They care about ease of use and appearance.

Open, federated systems will never be as simple as proprietary systems. Further, they'll never attract the money necessary to get even as close as possible in terms of ease of use and appearance. Non-proprietary systems will usually lose out of the gate, not because they're dragging a 100lb anvil of ideology but because the alternatives have a magic tailwind of simpler requirements and more resources. (And that's as pragmatic as you can get, right?)

Note: I'm not a Stallman-wannabe, I'm not wagging fingers (at the moment, on this issue), and I use proprietary solutions all the time. But I also know what I'm trading off.

Serious question: Why is email so successful? Why hasn't Facebook messenger or Slack or WhatsApp or any other siloed messaging service unseated it? Is it just because it was there first and now it's entrenched?

Why can't other services work like email and Matrix and have success? A lot of it just seems like success of marketing to me.

Another thing to consider is that e-mail is actually part of the DNS standard. Of course with SRV records, you could add discovery for any new arbitrary service via DNS, but the fact that it's part of that standard says something to just how old it is.

I think part of it is just the ease of setting up services. You can install new programs on your desktop win/macos and they'll update themselves and all that, but servers are not so easy. There are things that are coming out that make servers more pluggable/lego brick build-able like Sandstorm, and maybe one of those will really take off and make hosted apps something more individuals would be willing to pay for.

E-mail also has its huge share of problems. Setting up your own e-mail server is also super unreliable because of over-aggressive spam filters, as I wrote about here:

http://penguindreams.org/blog/how-google-and-microsoft-made-...

1. Like gmail? Hotmail? Any others?

2. You could argue that many of those others are taking over part of the email use-case, including file transfers.

3. I dunno.

Agree 100% the reality is more poignant when you go out of the tech bubble. Also if those open standards affect product maintainability vs simple integrations with less code, projects will tend to avoid it.

This is also Why complex Piracy/CD Ripping lost steam with services like Spotify/Netflix in countries with big piracy rings. Good user experience trumps ideology.

You seem to misunderstand technical debt [0]. There is no technical debt here. There is a maintenance overhead – as there is with every line of code – which SO no longer wish to support.

I do agree that we are going in the wrong direction, and that we should be building open, federated, distributed protocols/standards. However, OpenID is not a good example of such given its dependencies.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_debt

> OpenID is not a good example of such given its dependencies.

What is meant by "dependencies" here?