[lwhi]

I really hope that we end up moving back towards supporting open protocols.

I was heartened (and a little surprised) that Jack Dorsey recently mentioned that the draconian control of the Twitter API was the worst thing Twitter had done [1].

The corporatisation of the Internet, has undone a lot of the great work that had traditionally underpinned the network.

It feels like the slow, laborious and fundamentally equitable nature of standards ratification in the open has been seen to be at odds with the OKRs of tech businesses.

Businesses that sell and work with natural resources are starting to wake up to the idea that a degree of cooperation and inter-market regulation with peer companies can positively impact individual performance. Sustaining business is even more fundamental than making profit.

In the same sense; open protocols can help to develop rich and sustainable markets that benefit the consumer; as well as those businesses that operate in within it.

[1] https://www.revyuh.com/news/software/developers/twitters-fou...

[magpi3]

It really is about incentives. When the government and universities were the primary agents influencing the internet, open protocols were favored I presume because they incentivized the decentralization that the internet was created for.

Now private corporations are the primary agents of change, and they are driven by very different incentives. When was the last time you heard of a company based around open protocols being valued at a billion dollars?

And the money involved is just too great. I don't see how anything is going to change.

[networkimprov]

And yet none of those corporations has displaced email, despite the fact that it has become a universal cyberattack channel, with a stagnant UX that doesn't address most real-world use cases for email!

I saw a need for a safer, better, decentralized protocol for email, so I drafted one (TMTP) and implemented client & server. More at:

https://mnmnotmail.org/ & https://twitter.com/mnmnotmail

Related protocol projects in development include:

https://mathmesh.com/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Mail_Alliance

[magpi3]

> I saw a need for a safer, better, decentralized protocol for email, so I drafted one (TMTP) and implemented client & server.

We definitely do, and then we need big, heavy corporate advocates for this new protocol. That second part is the rub. I would argue that every company embraced email early only because proprietary formats that locked customers into a platform weren't yet a thing. Now that they are, it is so much harder to propose that we all "just get along" with shared protocols.

Your work looks very interesting and I applaud you for taking this on. I will take a look. I am not entirely pessimistic. Have you thought about building a company around it?

[networkimprov]

I have sketched a plan for a venture, for which I'd need co-founders (e.g. mobile app code & UX expertise) -- feel free to reach out via Twitter @mnmnotmail (link above).

Those big corporate advocates necessary for the success of a new email protocol are fortunately not the major email hosting players! See the mnm FAQ #2 for a plausible adoption path.

[lwhi]

Looks interesting.

If your draft didn't take off, what do you think the main reason would be?

[networkimprov]

At this early stage, I'd say the biggest obstacle is reaching a wide enough audience; I have no prior fame, and no PR budget yet.

[lwhi]

I'm quietly confident that it will. Much in life seems to follow the movement of a pendulum.

I appreciate how the tide turned, but societies appetite changes over time; and the fact is, open protocols are not anti-profit, or anti-business.

[gjvc]

It feels like the slow, laborious and fundamentally equitable nature of standards ratification in the open has been seen to be at odds with the OKRs of tech businesses.

At the risk of sounding like I'm trivialising this comment (with which I completely agree), this difference in behaviours has as its root the difference between a long- vs short-term mindset.

[rocqua]

I think the issue might be the huge amount of VC cash invested, and the need for such a player to have explosive growth to a huge valuation.

Open standards of federated systems could lead to slow sustainable growth with a spot for the original designers and pushers of the protocol. But open standards won't let you fully dominate the market, they don't allow you to leverage all the VC cash, and so they don't pay back on massive investment. Because quite a lot of the benefits are shared.

Moreover, slow growth can't compete with VC cash investment. The VC backed competition will have a better UX, more features, aggressive marketing, and in general be more developed. All because they can develop their product a lot faster because they have more money behind them.

[JohnWhigham]

I was heartened (and a little surprised) that Jack Dorsey recently mentioned that the draconian control of the Twitter API was the worst thing Twitter had done [1].

I wasn't, because he didn't do jack shit to change it. We hear this bullshit all the time; big actors sound off about what was wrong at their previous places, but rarely did they do anything to upset the apple cart.

[jrm4]

I'd say (and I think this happens quite often, moreso in politics) it is at least possible you may be overestimating his power to do so, perhaps at least by the time he realized it?

Twitter wasn't his github repo, it was his gazillion dollar company that has to answer to a lot of stakeholders.

(That being said, no reason to not get on them about it.)

[cblconfederate]

ways to monetize "open" are missing