"[...] People seem to hate email for the same reasons they once loved it. Email's underlying triumph, the quality that made it revolutionary, was that you could instantly deliver a written message to someone even if they weren't there to receive it. [...] Email is neutral, meaning that anyone can email anyone else with an email address. If you have a person's email address, your message will be delivered no matter who you are - whether the recipient is your oldest friend, your granddaughter, your boss's boss, or Beyoncé. The year the web was born, this flattening effect was astonishing. Anyone in an organization could communicate directly and immediately with anyone else, "regardless of rank" [...]"
- Adrienne LaFrance, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/01/what-...
I'd like to add one more very important aspect: you don't need to register with any or with yet another service, which will eventually fade into oblivion within a few years - or which will become so ignorant to privacy, like Facebook, that you end up deleting their apps and accounts.
Email is a set of protocol and thus it _will_ outlive any centalised, closed, walled garden.
(BTW this is what decentralisation people should understand: you need to build services using common protocols, not services which can be installed; mastodon is a bad example, activityfeeds or linked data are good ones)
> (BTW this is what decentralisation people should understand: you need to build services using common protocols, not services which can be installed; mastodon is a bad example, activityfeeds or linked data are good ones)
Mastodon/GNU Social uses standardised protocols. ActivityFeeds is an attempt to unify the a different protocol as a W3 standard. With ActivityFeeds you also will need to install a service just like Mastodon. But the whole point is that you don't need to install Mastodon yourself, you can use one that's already hosted (similar to the early days of email -- these days you generally have to use hosted email).
The fact that the Mastodon craze still inherited the community from GNU Social is evidence that it is a well designed federated system.
Any GNU Social implementation (such as the one run by the FSF or anyone else) is compatible with Mastodon. They use the same protocol, and that's been the case from day 1 (Mastodon is just an implementation of that protocol). Mastodon is not really "new" at all, it's just a nicer UX than previous implementations.
For example, MediaGoblin has been planning on peering with GNU Social to allow you to share media as GNU Social statuses (and you could then share and comment on media directly rather than having to send a link to it).
I think the situation is a bit different. While some companies have used XMPP for chat, I don't recall that any had advertised prominently the notion that you could use their chat system to talk to people on a different network. This was something that geeks could do (and did), but was never a selling point for the vast majority of users.
Compare this to email, where every user expects their email client to be able to email people on different providers. If, say, GMail suddenly stopped being usable to email people without a GMail address, all users would think it was broken, not just geeks.
The trend to centralize email is a more subtle one. For instance, make email work better when emailing someone at the same domain (also because it's technically easier to handle): I have seen people trained by GMail to send huge files as attachments because it works when sending them to other GMail users. Also, spam filtering: a small email provider sending email to a large one has a higher chance of being flagged as a spammer, and has to support all requisite technologies (SPF, DKIM, SSL if you don't want the email to be marked as insecure, not being on a blacklist or residential IP, etc.).
Long sorry short, I'd have trouble imagining that a major email provider could realistically stop supporting "federation". Maybe it could happen if major providers unite to create a walled garden between them and to cut off everyone else (unrealistic), or if one provider's market share increased to near-monopoly (somewhat unlikely for now because of the long tail of institutions, companies, universities, who still want to run their own). I think the main threat to email is non-federated systems that are more convenient to use on mobile (e.g., WhatsApp and others), or social networks in general. (This may sound far-fetched, but in France I do see many companies who advertise support on Twitter and Facebook but cannot be reached by email.)
It is a sad sign of the times, you can no longer (easily) set up an email server of your own and expect emails to be delivered to everyone.
Managing O365 for a few domains I quite frequently see mail from not-so-small companies with their own servers getting stuck in MS Quarantine filtering.
My email server is running on a cheap dedicated machine, with SPF and DKIM (and SSL) correctly set up, and which is only used to send my own email (no mass mailing, etc.). In many years of using this as my email system, I recall only two cases where my email was rejected: by a university, which required manual whitelisting; and by GMail once for an incomprehensible reason. Of course greylisting (delaying for a few hours the first time) is frequent, but that's fine. So I wouldn't say the picture is as grim as you suggest.
Maybe there were more cases where my mail got lost because of excessive filtering on other providers and where I didn't notice it, but there comes a point where I don't care and I can just blame the recipient if they use a provider which silently ignores some incoming mail...
XMPP just wasn't a very good fit for the problem we needed it to solve. It is a verbose, XML-based protocol (reflecting the time in which it was conceived), and it's a mess of extensions (possibly the designers getting carried away with the possibilities of XML) instead of focusing on solving a single core problem well -- this works against the ideal of federation: what happens when you send a message taking advantage of some extension to a user that doesn't support it, or to a user that does, but through an intermediate that doesn't?
Also, it doesn't tackle spam. The concept that anyone can email anyone would probably have killed email, had it not been largely (if by no means completely) solved -- ironically, this was achieved by all but doing away with federation (email now being a oligopoly of Google, Microsoft and a few more, more or less dictating who gets to send email to whom). Finally, what I suspect was the final nail in the coffin, XMPP didn't play well with mobile (not to worry, an extension, XEP-0286, currently in state "experimental" first published in 2010 is fixing that).
EDIT: I should clarify: XMPP works quite well for private (non-federated) IM-setups. I offer this as an explanation of why XMPP isn't the interoperable email of IM across the Internet, and we instead see Facebook/WhatsApp/Slack/million other incompatible things dominating the space.
The big companies gave up on it. Google, Facebook, etc.
Everyone wants their product to be the new hotness. See the copying of stickers, voice messages, and payments from Chinese/Japanese messaging products. Or how Skype became a Snapchat clone.
Companies giving up on open standards in favor of their own walled gardens does not really provide a meaningful commentary on the open standards themselves.
XMPP itself is a bit of a mess, but it's a standard with a lot of adoption, which has its own value.
A lot of adoption? How many users does XMPP have? I'm glad that XMPP is open, but as a standard, it's useless to me if none of my friends are using services that support it.
Not sure about the actual statistics, but XMPP is not just a standard for messaging between people: I think it's also intended as a backend technology for communication behind automated services. So even though there may not be many humans using XMPP as a messaging application, there may be many people who "use it" without noticing (as in, use a website, etc., which relies on XMPP somewhere).
XMPP Core is a protocol at (roughly) the same level as HTTP: it provides basic semantics for sending and getting data, and you can build your own application level protocols on top of it. XMPP IM is an application level protocol built on top of it that does something specific (instant messaging). It could have been built on HTTP as well, but they were designed to work well together.
If we're comparing XMPP core to HTTP, the difference is that XMPP core is async and stateful (like instant messaging sessions) and HTTP is synchronous and stateless (great for fetching documents).
I don't know how one could get a good estimate of this, but it is still very widely used. Whatsapp (with custom compression and federation disabled), HipChat Server, Cisco Jabber, Android push notifications, Google Cloud Print communications, etc. are all XMPP. But yes, for personal instant messaging Google and Facebook were the big players and they are no longer on it (at least as an interface to their clients)
People mostly stayed in their walled gardens; despite the possibility to leave and explore others. And the companies running chat services decided that it wasn't in their interests to allow people out of those gardens.
I guess if xmpp had been around at the time icq kicked things off things might have been different.
I used to use third party desktop & mobile chat clients for facebook and hangouts, both via XMPP. Then I guess they realized how much user data they were missing out on by not excluding third-party apps and dropped support.
It offers a full social network solution (publication, comments, replies, contacts…) and modern IM (chatrooms, stickers, history management, synchronisation between devices).
All in real-time, multi-platforms and fully built on XMPP :)
A better question might be: what can possibly replace email as an online identity - and also - do such a better job at it that I feel inclined to switch the 100's of services over to it - a task I would not take lightly.
Mastodon is built on open web protocols. Currently that's OStatus, coming forward we're adapting ActivityPub (which is probably what you meant? ActivityFeeds is not a real thing as far as I can see)
Maybe in US this holds, but things may be different in different places.
I'm a Chinese living in the bay area. I think people here treat E-mails as part of their daily life probably because most of them began to use it before the mobile internet is a thing. On the contrary, in China where the majority internet users are mobile-savvy, WeChat is the new email. Actually E-mails are only for official communications there, and I don't think official communications can be treated as "social networks".
I'm wondering if the same thing is happening in other developing countries where people first touched facebook/whatsapp before even knowing E-mail exists.
Yeah, there's a big list of global differences around "what technology was around when these systems started getting built." Results in a weird mix of things looking both more and less futuristic than wherever home is in certain places; for me this was most striking when visiting Japan a while back and seeing how automated with vending machines and such a lot of ramen shops were compared to the US, but at the same time how cash-based they still were - the vending machines were very clearly very mechanical, not networked or "smart" machines, that just processed paper money and nothing else.
I was in Japan last year, and I found the the ramen shop vending machines to very useful and reliably good at their job. What struck me as weird in Japan was the dominance of flip phones. I think they use them for credit card transactions and email which they pioneered earlier. So when smartphones came along, they didn't adopt them as rapidly as the US or Australia.
I think it's a bit reductionist to say "X is the new <existing standard>". Especially when X is proprietary.
Email is a standard. There are multiple providers. It's a great lowest-common-denominator.
Does any company really want a part of that without changing the above? I thought Uber establishing a "defacto standard" for ride-sharing which can be copied by competitors is one of the strategy points we criticize here on HN?
I don't know the Chinese market, but just keep in mind at some point everyone thought that FB/Twitter were going to kill RSS. Fact is, RSS is still around and being used a lot (Podcasts?). While FB/Twitter have restricted access to monetize (or prevent others monetizing) their proprietary platform.
Email will be still around when WeChat is dead and gone.
When you lease an apartment, do you get the details via WhatsApp/WeChat/TodaysChatApp or email? How about receipts, bank statements, anything where deliverability actually matters?
Email is infrastructure; people invest in it. If the only people investing in these chat apps are themselves people, these apps could be ghost towns in years.
In some sense you're right; in another sense, it still seems like email is likely to outlive walled gardens because there's no long-term reason to use them.
In particular, unless there's a decent way to ensure that nobody can take my received messages away from me, i'm unlikely to adopt it for anything but chatting with friends.
In China, you will probably do all of the above in WeChat rather than email. Whenever I need to conduct business with someone in China, it's always over WeChat rather than email.
One of the Chinese court systems actually sends notifications through their WeChat account. I believe there are even pilot programs where you can initiate court cases through WeChat as well.
As a non-Chinese, this seems... problematic to say the least. What if you don't have WeChat, or prefer not to use it? Are there standards-based alternatives offered? Off-line alternatives, maybe?
Chiming in to share an anecdote from yesterday, I was in the MacStore and there was what I'd describe as a totally normal early 20s white guy there, they asked him for an email address to send his confirmation or sth, and he was like "dude, I don't really use email, can I not get an SMS or something?" …… turns out that's not possible, so he gave them a friend's email address, the same one (his friend's) that he uses for his iCloud account.
For discussion its fine, but documentation still needs to exist. I feel like we're in the point of the technology cycle where people realise Slack and friends can't solve all their problems, just as email/phone calls/memos/whatever don't form long term documentation.
I actually tend to agree here. While purism is understandable (email is, should and will continue to be the gold standard) reality is that no-one has 10 years to spare waiting for users to realize its value once more and migrate back in droves.
Also, who's to say communication won't become my-bot-against-your-bot kind of thing for instance? Given choice between standards and convenience people don't seem to think too long before going with the latter..
I've got 13 years of emails in my personal gmail account, keeping track of everything from bill payments & receipts to valuable conversations. How does WeChat satisfy something very long-term like that? I don't see how any of the existing, popular messaging platforms can replace the fixed, archival value of email.
The majority of Internet users in the US - nearly 80% of US adults have a smartphone - are mobile savvy and were that way before the Chinese majority got there. Being mobile savvy has nothing to do with it.
> How does WeChat satisfy something very long-term like that?
You can search your message history. I think that's enough for most personal archives. Of course if WeChat goes away, many people will be unable to access their archives, but at the moment, few seem to be worrying about that.
> Being mobile savvy has nothing to do with it.
Not being internet savvy before becoming mobile savvy has something to do with it. I'd wager that most heavy email users had an email address before they got their smart phone.
If you don't already have an extensive email archive, keeping all your personal communication in email no longer seems so compelling.
The most important thing about email is that you get your own, immutable copy of every message. You can keep your copy and know that it will be exactly the same when you look at it next week, it won't have been silently (or even not silently) "corrected".
It's both a blessing and a curse, as anybody who's accidentally emailed the wrong people or hit send before finishing editing knows, but it's the most powerful thing about email (and SMS or even fax for that matter!) - you get your own copy.
That is only one important aspect. It's also provider-independent (as long as you own the domain, that is true) and is, by nature, decentralised. (Like really decentralised, even by redundancy provaded by MX record priority in DNS.)
Unfortunately very few people have their own domain for email (although they should!).
When companies have kindly sent me their entire customer list (by using CC in place of BCC) I see there are very few domains in it outside of the major free email providers, and those that remain are mostly for their work or small business. A personal or family domain is very rare.
I have my own domain, and I really should be using me@myowndomain but I don't. I use gmail. One reason is that so many people and services already know the gmail one so it's hard to change, but the biggest reason is that I don't trust myself nor the place where I registered for my domain to actually maintain the domain name registry and email delivery for say 10 or 20 years without any maintenance.
The value of these behemoth services is that they are more or less guaranteed to be more stable than anything you can configure yourself. They are too big to fail. Even just pointing my me@myowndomain to gmail doesn't help here. It just adds a new weakest link to the chain.
I've had domains registered for over 20 years already, much longer than gmail has existed.
You can renew a domain for ten years in advance and easily transfer between registrars (and email providers, I use Fastmail), so it's a lot more reliable for the (very) long term than a third-party service.
You can also assume that copy will remain readable - standards and multiple vendors matter.
I have no huge issue with moving to a more IM-based interaction as my default, but I've yet to find one that is actually compatible with them all. I need 3-5 apps to communicate to everyone right now, and in a few years some of those will be gone and new ones will be added.
This is part of why I send email in plain text. HTML is probably not going away any time soon, but plain text has been around several decades longer at least.
At least HTML can be trivially converted to text. Who wants to bet that your conversations in WhatsApp, or WeChat, or Facebook, or whatever the kids are using today, are binary blobs that require a running, proprietary "app" to view, or only available through a cloud service?
I often look up E-mails from 5-10 years ago to find some piece of obscure information. It's a really nice archive for exchange of thoughts. I don't think my Slack or Facebook messages will stay around for that long.
I'm surprised we haven't seen the mIRC's of email yet (or maybe there have but that just didn't work?). mIRC was a popular client for IRC on Windows. It extended IRC with features such as color and formatting in your messages, which was beyond the protocol. A feature like that worked just fine because the color codes were mostly invisible to those who weren't using a client that supported them. In this way, mIRC and other clients could move the protocol forward via graceful degradation without having to wait for a new IRC specification update.
I can imagine the same thing being done to email, where modern features could be built on top of email, which just gracefully degrade if those features aren't available in the client (e.g. something similar to inline source maps, which can decorate parts of the email for clients that support it, but are otherwise out of view for clients that don't). If the feature is useful enough, other clients will adopt them, pushing the protocol forward.
That can be done easily enough with @media queries, I suppose. It's possible to send a table-less, fully responsive, modern HTML email that is invisible for less-modern clients. It doesn't require anything special and is possible today.
The problem is that people who send email need it to look a certain way, and leaving older clients behind, just like you'd have done in IRC/mIRC, is not an option. So having the option to use modern features doesn't change anything, at least for email.
> The problem is that people who send email need it to look a certain way
I think it's fair to say that actual people don't need any of this. It's businesses and advertisers that would be the overwhelming consumer of these abilities.
Multipart emails have been doing this for as long as I can remember - emails are delivered with an HTML part and a plain text on for compatibility with clients that don't support it. There's no reason you couldn't release your new mail client with text/mailml support, but you'll have to get people to use it.
Also, please use text/markdown instead of inventing yet another weird markup. Bonus points if it's CommonMark (which is much more strictly defined and thus guaranteed to look the same across renderers).
I've wondered about the viability of text/markdown for email from time to time. It would make a very nice sensible default: the sender can write an email with a hierarchy of headers, quoting (exactly the same way done now with text/plain and supported by most clients), emphasis, hyperlinks, lists, etc., all without depriving the receiver of their preferred formatting and font settings. Also, not nearly as verbose as HTML (and not nearly as much crap).
I've been thinking about this a lot lately--I'd really love in-email applications, especially with Web Assembly working its way into viability. Being able to act on stuff without leaving my inbox would be fantastic. Unfortunately, lots of potential for abuse and also the fact that email protocol is so entrenched.
> I can imagine the same thing being done to email, where modern features could be built on top of email, which just gracefully degrade if those features aren't available in the client
There are dozens of apps like this. The most straightforward example is probably Redkix.
> There is absolutely no good reason why we should have to create email newsletters that require tables for layout.
One of my projects over the last couple months for FWD:Everyone has been stripping tables from commercial emails while keeping their content and trying to preserve a comparable layout while just using paragraph tags and other simple markup. It's an interesting challenge, given that tables can be recursively nested inside cells in all sorts of different combinations. You'd think that it wouldn't even be possible to do this and get the ordering of block elements right, but it actually seems to consistently work for tables with mostly text content.
In our case the reason we did this because we want to format emails in a consistent way to make them readable, and also it's easier to guarantee that our redaction tool is properly redacting content when we limit ourselves to a fixed subset of HTML.
Web based mail clients are nearly as bad with how much CSS etc. they strip out. Gmail is particularly aggressive. Yes Outlook is terrible, but there's plenty of security conscious developers throwing baby out with bathwater when it comes to email design .
I don't know how inbox does it, but I like how some newsletters are rendered on it, the product hunt newsletter shows up as just the top three/four posts of the day.
You can send plain text encoding with format=flowed to avoid the hard wrap. Personally I prefer 80 chars, though. Still looks fine in landscape mode on any phone.
In what respect? I don't think i've ever gotten an important SMS outside of personal communications, let alone the 50+ emails I get a day that are considered "important" in some way.
I think your OP probably meant to constrain the point to messaging. HTTP, telnet, etc aren't really messaging, implying asynchronous delivery, they're socket protocols.
I guess in theory you could leave an HTTP packet for someone to pick up months later, but existing networks would time it out.
Also XMPP, but that's not gained a lot of traction. IRC also doesn't seem primed to burst back onto the scene.
(To be honest, the only thing I really like about slack over IRC is history. I wonder if that couldn't be processed in a more peer-to-peer manner over IRC?)
I used to hear people saying all the time "well, the correct way to handle [messaging problem X] is to use XMPP" but more recently people seem to talk of it like a dead man walking.
Is it really so bad? Is there anything on the horizon that could replace email as an open messaging protocol?
I guess kilobyte-sized text snippets are probably a pretty good fit for a blockchain-based trustless messaging service. A million monkeys are hacking on that right now, right? Maybe that will just leapfrog everything else?
I've never implemented it, but from a user standpoint, there aren't any widely-available services that people seem to use. gchat appears to be shutting their endpoints down. Facebook shut theirs down in 2014.
People got familiar with email because their ISP/employer provided them with an email address. Eventually it became a thing on it's own. Chat was never like that. There was always one service you used, and all your friends used. Now that's gchat and facebook chat.
Just to be precise: Google and Facebook did not shut down their xmpp servers, they just disabled the ability to connect to them via xmpp clients, to make sure everyone uses their web clients, so they don't loose any data they could've collected otherwise...
The original Google Talk ifnrastructure is still up and running and clients can connect to it using a protocol derived from XMPP (basically a subset XMPP converted to protobuf) and use it to message devices (Android uses it push messaging, but technically you can also send messages directly between devices). It's not directly used for text messaging though.
You don't lose anything (assuming your whole team uses the same bouncer, which is a good solution, IMO), logs will remain saved on the disk drive, but people will be unable to connect. Personally I have a bouncer running on a VPS since 2008 with 100% uptime so far, costs me $3/month and is used by 10 people.
If my bouncer goes down, I don't have the history for the period for which it was down. Congrats on 100% uptime, but that's not the numbers one should plan by.
If the bouncer goes down and your team uses only the bouncer, someone fixes the problem before new history is made, and nothing is lost. Fixing the problem means rebooting the machine, there is absolutely nothing that can go wrong with a simple IRC bouncer.
Matrix also isn't too set on chat. It would be quite possible to send email over Matrix. Maybe once Matrix has some kind of solution to spam that would be something to explore. With bridges to SMTP, if you'd like.
A shameless plug, but if you like HN and email, my side-project, http://www.hackernewsletter.com/, might be worth a look. Rolling past 50k subscribers this month.
That is 100% fair, but not an easy question to answer!
I curate by hand using a custom tool that helps me search/filter articles and basically find a mix of things I like along with things that subscribers tend to click on. I tend to avoid "click-bait" type articles with little substance and try to get a good mix of things that were popular with things that should of stayed on the home page more. I've been doing this for seven years now, so I feel like I have something that works... but ultimately you'll have to see if it fits what you're looking for. :)
I enjoy email, but get frustrated when conversations get long. Here is my favourite quote about email, which explains the issue lovingly:
--
A: Because it reverses the logical flow of conversation.
Q: Why is top posting frowned upon?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing on usenet and in email?
Run into this sort of problem all the time using Jira service desk, internal view of a ticket is new comments add to the bottom, customer view of the same ticket is that comments add to the top.
Results in everyone using 'please see below' or 'above' and everyone being confused
Email should not be used for group conversation, period. From one person to many is OK. Between two people is also OK (They can usually keep a conversation consistent in some way). Group discussions with multiple people over email is usless. Discourse and similar is a much better alternative to that.
So glad to see the pro-email comments! People seem so down on email, I made buttons for those of us who still like it: http://giantcatco.bigcartel.com/
> For others, it might mean one original article blurred out in a newsletter. (Inside’s newsletter CMS is built to handle toggling between paid-for and free content.)
Anyone know of an open source or paid Newsletter Management CMS? I'm working on a content site like inside, for a very small sports niche, and am thinking of making it a daily newsletter with paid subscriptions, instead of a regular website driven by WordPress or some other CMS, with ads, which would be super annoying and not monetize well these days.
We built our own CMS after realizing there is nothing out there. Our CMS has the email-based paywall system, plus manages all the opens and pre-subscriptions (i.e. you can subscribe to new newsletters before we launch them).
We just added a secret new feature: inside.com/alerts, which allows us to send news to people by SMS if they can't wait for the emails.
In terms of paid newsletters, there will be 2-3 in each of 1,000 vertical with over $100-250,000 in revenue each based on what I can see.
Besides search-ability, one thing I love about email is that I know the sender isn't going to be notified when I read it. Contrast that with FB where I know the sender will see a little "read" notification, and then I have pressure to respond, etc.
Google's Inbox is basically an email client reimagined as a social network feed. They might have cocked up g+ (and whatever is was before that), but this one they've done pretty well (as long as you don't think of it as just another email client).
I was intrigued, so I just looked at the "Inside Premium" plan -- $10/mo for one newsletter?? You can get a digital subscription to Washington Post and NYT for basically half that!
NYT and Netflix are an exceptional value at $10 a month, but those are large scale consumer content. In the B2B content space, any content that saves folks a couple of hours a week is worth a LOT of money.
in this case, $10-25 a month is nothing... really, it's like zero dollars in the context of a business executive making six figures.
Still not sure I'd pay for it out of pocket (but who knows!), but I missed the B2B angle on the first read and was reacting to the price point as a news consumer. IMO neither the article nor the premium page does a great job of showing me that kind of value -- the only allusions to B2B value I saw were "research reports" in the article and "let us be your research team" on the page. But I suppose that's because you're still figuring out what premium should be.
Hope you figure it out and wishing you success here. I love me some email.
I'm a longtime subscriber to Launch Ticker (their tech/startup newsletter). It lets me very quickly be kept abreast of fundraising and M&A activity relevant to my startup. Saves me about 30 minutes a day of visiting several popular tech news sites, so well worth $10/month to me.
Been a subscriber to a few of their newsletters for a some months now and have to say the content is great. Can't wait to see what else the Inside team rolls out.
I hear people say this from time to time, but I think once you get to college and into the workforce you start to center your life around TXT and email.
I view each email address as an LTV of $10-50 and every phone number as 2x that. Owning emails and phone numbers is the great asset any startup can have -- but so many founders miss this!
Maybe. Over the past few years, we gained a few B2B clients who actually insist on using Whatsapp over email. We've resisted it somewhat (the final confirmation must still be sent over email), but if the trend continues, I'm not sure we'll be able to.
That's complete nonsense. Once people grow older (the one's who have the money for your product), email is the standard. No one sits on text messaging all day to communicate any real business.
I kinda view it as a feature that folks who lock themseles in as Facebook content sharecroppers don't engage in communication with the world outside their ML-insulated and monetized bubble. I'm not sure that constitutes "dying" though.
If you are doing unskilled labor, you know the kind eligible for overtime at all, you or your employees are text message and Facebook. And the Facebook part is a big maybe if they are also under 30 and not that impressionable.
Oh that have an address or two. Apple gave them one. A utility company gave them one. But its an afterthought
Huh. Good to know. Thanks =).. Ok. For the record, I am not under 30 (it's probably very obvious), and I was always a dork, even when I was under 30, way long ago in the stone age before cool cars were electric with touch screens (I'm pretty jealous of that, though).
I hear this from a lot of people online, but my group, which isn't majority techies may prefer FB for sharing photots, but any planning or broadcasts announcements are always via email.
I'd like to add one more very important aspect: you don't need to register with any or with yet another service, which will eventually fade into oblivion within a few years - or which will become so ignorant to privacy, like Facebook, that you end up deleting their apps and accounts.
Email is a set of protocol and thus it _will_ outlive any centalised, closed, walled garden.
(BTW this is what decentralisation people should understand: you need to build services using common protocols, not services which can be installed; mastodon is a bad example, activityfeeds or linked data are good ones)