[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.