SMTP is one of the most significant communications protocols used on
the internet today. While HTTP is ubiquitous and probably the first to
come to mind for the average person, email is the de facto standard for
interpersonal communications online. Of all the services I have hosted
on eom.dev, the mailserver has been the most involved to set up;
however, it is also the one I use most often. I use this account for
just about everything. Most people have an email account, and most
institutions use email as a basis for identity. While websites, game
servers, and live streams are visually impressive, the SMTP server is
easily the most useful in daily life.
This message was written as a plain text email that was sent to
meta.projects.discourse@eom.dev. Discourse converts incoming emails to
this and other category-based addresses into forum posts (listed
below). Other services, such as Gitea, offer similar functionality.
Beyond my own self-hosted services, the ability to interact with HTTP
web servers via SMTP allows me to interact with services across the
internet from a single account and a single interface. Having spent a
lot of time thinking about decentralized, self-hosted, and federated
services on the internet, it strikes me that email may be a simple
solution that does not need to achieve wide-spread adoption - because
it already is widely adopted. I am not the first to notice this. An
article by Justin Pot written in 2024 makes the same point:
Further, the project Uhuro aims to create an entirely email-based
social network. Unfortunately, I have found little information about
this project beyond their website, and have not been able to confirm
the advertised functionality with my eom.dev account (which may be due
to my messages being marked as spam because of incorrect rDNS records).
In spite of the ubiquity of email, ActivityPub and Mastodon are
generally considered the standard for federated social media. While
ActivityPub has seen fairly widespread integration into many different
services (Owncast, PeerTube, and even Discourse), the total number of
users on this protocol is, unfortunately, low by comparison to its
competitors. Further, it is an uphill battle to get the average user
to switch from these major platforms. Email, as has been stated,
already has widespread adoption - even more so than major social media
platforms.
Self-hosting an email server is not necessarily a trivial endeavor,
though I would say it is only slightly more difficult than getting
Mastodon running. Major providers require many layers of
authentication before delivery to accounts on their platforms is
possible. Several types of encryption certificates are needed and
multiple DNS records must be configured correctly in order to have a
fully functional email server. Doing so, however, puts one fully in
control of their online identity and digital communications. Much of
this setup process can be automated, and a personal email server can
run comfortably on a humble Raspberry Pi. In spite of the challenges,
this could be a much simpler path towards a federated and decentralized
platform with widespread adoption.
As previously mentioned, one can read, create, and reply to Discourse
threads through an email client; however, this service is a forum, not
an email archive. It has some features that allow it to behave
similarly to a mailing list, but the web interface is intended to be
the source-of-truth for the site's content.
As an experiment, I have enabled the mailing list features and disabled
editing in the General category. You are invited to send an email to
general.discourse@eom.dev if you would like to experiment with this
concept. It may be desirable to allow the emails themselves to be the
source-of-truth for an email-based online community, rather than an
additional HTTP web interface. While disabling editing provides a
similar experience, one could also employ a Uhuro-like back end with a
more accessible web interface like Open Archiver for a true email-first
community.
Migrating to such a platform would enable some features not currently
supported by Discourse, such as PGP encryption and signatures. Without
going into too much detail, this provides end-to-end encryption and
identity verification. Additionally, if users of the platform were to
prefer communicating directly by email rather than through the
messaging features withing services such as Discourse, the community is
able to exist independently of the server.
I am still experimenting with these features and have learned a few
things that are worth sharing to those who would like to try this out
for themselves:
1. The subject is the post title
2. Use plain text formatting
3. Do not send PGP encrypted messages or signatures to Discourse
4. Some Discourse servers remove email signatures - this one does not
Please feel free to share your thoughts on this concept!