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Lemmy.ml and beehaw.org getting hammered with traffic because of spez ama
(lemmy.blahaj.zone)
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this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2023
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Lemmy
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This is just a false statement; I can email my friends on GMail just fine from my Protonmail account. I think you’re meaning to characterize malicious methods to keep people on the platform, but that issue is orthogonal to getting people registered.
The issue Lemmy has right now is getting normal people registered.
Protonmail is one of the larger providers of email at this point.
If you were to set up your own SMTP server and try to deliver mail, you essentially cannot reliably email any of the larger providers, because they've taken steps to mitigate spam and issues which also makes it impossible to handle your own email anymore, even if the intent wasn't explicitly to break self-hosting.
If you concentrate everyone into larger providers, you're allowing them the ability to gatekeep who can and cannot talk to their users, and most people will either not understand this, or be happy to allow it.
I will admit to some bias in not trusting there to be a 'central' server that's run and maintained with the good of the community in mind because there are endless, endless examples of situations where the owners/maintainers of a service have decided to take actions that are fundamentally against their users best interests - which, of course, is probably why anyone is actually here discussing this in the first place.
Could onboarding be improved? Absolutely. But I really don't think the solution is to have a small handful of blessed instances and try to push everyone to them.
But this isn't true either? I can easily spin up a SMTP server on a homelab, create an MX record, and email my friends with Gmail accounts as if I was emailing from my Protonmail or Gmail account.
I appreciate you acknowledging your bias against central providers, but to be honest I think it's leading to some incorrect conclusions. This discussion is also kind of getting derailed, but I'd be happy to continue debating about it.
Interesting; my general experience (and that of customers I spent time working with doing support for various cloud providers) was that you could, theoretically do so, but 'sending the email to a provider' and 'the provider accepts it and delivers it' were not always the same thing.
Microsoft was especially bad in that it would accept the message, and give you the standard SMTP 'message accepted' response but then silently just drop it in the backend, never to be seen again. Didn't go to spam, didn't land in a filter just... vanished.
Google, at least, had the decency to tell you when it was going to reject your email, but still.
It was always the same dance: you need a PTR, an SPF record, DKIM, etc. but at the end of the day, Google and Microsoft absolutely gatekeep what gets delivered to their platform, so if it's critical that your email shows up reliably every time, you have to move into the "ecosystem" of ESPs and all the hoops that are involved there if you want your message to go to the 'big providers'.