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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • with mass services requiring mandatory phone number binding I think being in user mass is a viable option - you cannot get reliable “secondary” email anymore and people don’t look through data leak dumps by eyes anyway, script doesn’t care about email address string - it all becomes hash anyway. Whois protection is pretty reliable to divert snooping 3rd-parties.

    As for expensive… yeah, sad state of affairs is that there’s nothing cheap about hosting your own infrastructure. Price of not really trusting anyone or having obscure technical requirements.


  • Encryption in transit is pretty much solved these days with TLS, what OP wants is E2E - encryption from sender to recipient with no intermediate parties having an idea about contents of the message. Problem with E2E is inconvenience: emails are inaccessible without private keys and key management is pain. Users don’t want additional headache of managing their keys between bajillion of devices where they might use emails







  • Opinionated piece with no substance or analysis, author already has some answer in mind and is trying to spin everything around to support it.

    Just to illustrate:

    That’s why Zuckerberg bought Instagram: he had been turning the screws on Facebook users, and when Instagram came along, millions of those users decided that they hated Zuck more than they loved their friends and so they swallowed the switching costs and defected to Instagram. In an ill-advised middle-of-the-night memo to his CFO, Zuck defended spending $1b on Instagram on the grounds that it would recapture those Facebook escapees:

    https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/29/21345723/facebook-instagram-documents-emails-mark-zuckerberg-kevin-systrom-hearing

    In this very link, in court-released emails Zuck states they’re buying Instagram because they have good growth and Facebook mobile usability is shit. It’s just 2 different types of social networks, back in 2012 you couldn’t even DM on Instagram, it wasn’t a replacement for Facebook by any means and vice versa. Zuck was just not happy that people spend their phone screen time outside of his reach.



  • Programming knowledge is largely irrelevant, as in to gain sensible benefits from it you have to be generalist software engineer with decade+ of experience of seeing it all. Then yeah, you can read any code, any stack traces and figure out the intent of developers of the system and what is undocumented/incorrectly documented.

    Focusing on one particular language is the right and wrong answer at the same time. Wrong in a sense that you’ll have to pick up other languages along your journey anyway and right because you need to achieve mastery in one of them to get to more advanced programming topics. Pick a language that you have fun using and don’t care about anything else.

    As for what to learn for self-hosting… Linux (pick a distro, let’s say ubuntu LTS w/o gui, ssh there and get comfortable with it. It includes installation, filesystems, RAID setups), networking, HTTP/S (that’s the main thing you’ll be interacting with as self-hoster and knowing various nuances of reverse proxying is a must), firewalling, basics of security and hardening, docker, monitoring, backups.