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by karencarits 1583 days ago
I've always wondered why emails aren't used as back-bone for more services. In many aspects, facebook is just a mailing list with ads and a fancy front-end. And in some ways, visiting a web page is just emailing the server and receiving the web page in response. And in some ways, the latter would be perfect to keep an archive of important stuff
2 comments

Richard Stallman browses the web via email.

https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html

> I generally do not connect to web sites from my own machine, aside from a few sites I have some special relationship with. I usually fetch web pages from other sites by sending mail to a program (see https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/womb/hacks.git) that fetches them, much like wget, and then mails them back to me. Then I look at them using a web browser, unless it is easy to see the text in the HTML page directly. I usually try lynx first, then a graphical browser if the page needs it (using konqueror, which won't fetch from other sites in such a situation).

> perfect to keep an archive of important stuff

Most stuff is not important.

at least Delta Chat[1] builds Instant Messaging on the email infrastructure.

[1] https://delta.chat