For about a week now I've been using OpenBSD on my laptop quite a bit. I've always known about the advantages of BSDs in general and I figured going into it I'd probably like it, but not enough to consider switching away from linux to BSD. However, the more I use OpenBSD, get used to it, and read the man pages, the more I start to REALLY like it. When I started using OpenBSD on my laptop, something a bit unexpected happened. I had almost the same wow factor I had when I first installed linux on my laptop after it was using Windows. Sure the difference between Linux and Windows is obviously more extreme than the difference between BSD and linux in terms of bloat, but it was still a breath of fresh air because Linux was starting to become a bit slow on my laptop, but rather than upgrading the laptop (which I should probably do at some point anyways), I tried OpenBSD and it flew again. Now tbh there are some things that will be slower at first, mainly GUI stuff, but you can make tweaks to improve that, but what really flew was the terminal/tty experience. You may think thats silly to point out since the terminal is fast in general, but not on linux on my potato of a laptop. It was common to get input lag. With OpenBSD that problem seems to have vanished. I was impressed by this because if anything I thought everything would be slower since OpenBSD prioritizes security, not performance. So I could only imagine how fast FreeBSD would run on it, but tbh I'm more interested in OpenBSD since FreeBSD kinda just feels like using linux again, whereas OpenBSD is more interesting imo. That being said, I will likely experiment with FreeBSD more as well in the near future anyways just to get an idea of what sets it apart from linux.
This is the worst writers block ever. This is a feeling I always get when starting to write something where it just HAS to be original or the whole thing was pointless and not worth anyones time. This block has stopped me from writing about things I'm actually pretty passionate about, mainly because I try to avoid being a clone or reinvented wheel of sites that already do good at their own thing. I've thought about writing about privacy stuff, but I avoided it because digdeeper would be a better resource anyways. I've thought about making guides for things I couldn't find guides for initially, but then dre, digdeeper, and daniel did nearly everything I thought about writing about myself. So I end up in a spot where I do nothing or even delete the whole site because then I wonder what the point was in the first place.
For a long time I thought I would be stuck in that mentality forever and never want to make anything. However, there was a small light of hope. I would go to do something different for once and make a comic. It sucks ass, nothing like xkcd, but for some reason, I actually kinda enjoy making them anyways. And if that wasn't enough fuel to keep me going, I came across a writeup that genuinely inspired me to continue. It discusses the fear around imitation on the web. I'm sure even this writeup isn't original and it can be argued I could've found this anywhere else or just motivated myself, but that didn't take away from the message at all in my opinion. Here's the snippet from the writeup that really got to me.
"The so-called "indie" web is all about experimentation and education, both of which rely on some level of imitation. Whether it's copying and pasting some CSS code to get started writing your first webpage or just looking through the world of software and computer design and making note of specific elements you enjoy and want to replicate, some level of imitation is required to learn and experiment.
Imagine a world where you couldn't do that. Where some restrictive intellectual property law prevented you from even copying someone else's design without asking for explicit permission first. This is the world that proprietary software makers and their collaborators wish to create. A system that operates fundamentally around fear, the greatest killer of creativity and expression."
It just makes too much sense imo. Imagine if digdeeper had a monopoly on based indie web writeups about society and we're not allowed to be inspired due to some stupid law. The small web would arguably be worse off. It would make it harder for people to branch off and become their own thing. Sure there'd be no clones, but that also means no successors, no inspiration, no motivation, then nothing.
Email is one of the last standardized early web protocols still used by the common man. Others like XMPP and IRC are seen by average joes as 'old school' or 'nerdy' or even 'dated' even though we'd argue our style of chat is normal and new shit like discord/matrix/guilded/telegram/signal/etc is the new ghetto normal you should avoid at all costs. That being said however, one thing many of us still use regardless of our stance on the internet heirarchy is email. While I do like the idea of email and the base functionality of it, there are a number of things that have always kinda turned me off about it.
First of all, the elephant in the room. Many of the providers for email are shit. You either need to self host or manage to get one of the few good providers out there like kallist or riseup. In contrast, most XMPP providers are fine, and IRC you don't even need a 'provider' per say since it works more like Mumble in the sense that you can just set a nick and join and choose whether or not you want to register your nick. That being said however, if you can manage to get a good provider or self host, this is no longer an issue. It's just an inconvenience for newbies.
Second of all, it should probably go without saying that average joes use email very differently compared to those who use email for its original purpose. For them, it has become more of a corporate notification system advertising junk and used for account verification rather than a simple way to communicate with people. This is what a lot of people use email for now (as well as work, but still). Due to this unfortunate reality as well as the rise of cell phone usage, I've heard many people theorize that eventually email will be deprecated in favor of phone only verification. Judging from the ways things are going, I feel its not a question of if, but when this will happen.
Now if you use email the og way, perhaps none of this concerns you since so far this has mostly been a critique on the corporate side of email. But if you know what you're doing, it's fairly easy to avoid all this nonsense. However, even in the comfy realm of the small web, I find that email is still kind of lost its way to some degree. It doesn't suffer the big corpo problem around here, but it actually seems to suffer from lower usage. While it may not be uncommon to still see people use email, I've noticed many people seem to prefer the protocols that are more like instant messaging such as XMPP, IRC, and even Mumble. Admittedly I tend to be the same way as thats what I've gotten used to over the years, but I feel like email has an unmatched charm as well as still being useful due to it's asynchronus nature. In a way, email from the communication pov doesn't seem to suffer as many of the pitfalls the chatroom model does, especially if you find yourself in a debate where you need to cite sources. You can take your time to research and write your message with email, but in the realm of instant messaging, people are more prone to impatience and petty arguments, and you can find yourself forced into a position to hurry up. Combine that with instant messaging usually leaning more towards the likes of microblogging than email, and you have a recipe for rushed brainlet output at times.
Another issue I have with email is it seems not many people use PGP encryption. Unencrypted email is quite insecure and shouldn't be used unless its literally intended to be public. While PGP encryption isn't hard to setup, I could understand not setting up/using it if you find yourself in my shoes where you know little to nobody whatsoever that uses PGP with their email. Personally I know so few people that even use email period that for a little while I didn't even have a mail client installed. Maybe it's just because of the side of the internet I'm on, but it feels like email is somewhat uncommon and that with pgp its kinda rare.
Now despite all of this, I want to try and use email a little more often. It's at least nice to have and I know occasionally you'll need an email for some things, but I encourage anyone who is reading this who doesn't use email or uses email the modern corporate way to give the og email experience a try. I think there is still value left in it if you're willing to explore it and even get people to use pgp encryption.