[p2p-research] "Many of us will not send mail to gmail.com"

[marc fawzi]

It's resilience and autonomy (thru 'redundant inter-dependence') not
robustness or efficiency. The appeal of investing our attention (and
potentially our energy) in p2p email solutions is for those of us who
wish to guarantee resilience and autonomy. A different mindset than
those who just want to use the tool that is currently most convenient.

The issue is resilience and autonomy are "principles" and not just
logical measures against some unthinkable disaster that may or may not
happen.

However, whenever the unthinkable happens you'll be happy you had
stuck to those principles...



On Sun, May 10, 2009 at 1:48 AM, M. Fioretti <mfioretti at nexaima.net> wrote:
> On Sun, May 10, 2009 13:28:20 PM +0700, Michel Bauwens wrote:
>> I'll second wholeheartedly this explanation by Ryan,
>>
>> especially for non-tech oriented people like myself, we want to
>> drive the car, but are not interested in knowledge about the motor.
>
> There are technical reasons too, to not like centralized email
> providers, and Marc explained those well, but the nature of the core
> issue is different.  I don't think the car motor is an accurate
> analogy in the context of the question I asked.
>
> The nature of the question is not "why don't you look under the hood
> and learn how to build or fix a car engine? It feels great!"
>
> The question I'm asking is on the same type of
>
> "why are you buying cars from a company that is known to adopt child
> labor to keep prices low?"
>
> The question above **is** a real exhageration, of course. I'm the
> first to not take it seriously. It's just a quick way to stress the
> point that the core issues is not technical, nor does it require
> technical expertise or interest.
>
> A much more accurate example of what category my question was meant to
> fall in is:
>
> "why, whenever you need a cab ride, you keep calling the cab company
> which officially uses only one single gas station for all its taxis (=
> if that one, centralized gas source breaks, none of those cabs will
> work) and officially declares that they keep a voice recorder always
> on in all their cars?"
>
> Again, this doesn't mean necessarily that Gmail is bad period, is just
> an example that a big part of the question isn't technical at all.
>
>> Gmail has by far the most interesting ecology of services, it is
>> what made the crucial difference that losing my laptop without
>> backup wasn't actually a catastrophe, because my material is
>> available through the gmail archive.
>
> What saved your day is using web-based email and online backups. I
> don't question such services, both of which are available in many
> other ways. It is just curious to realize that this is the place where
> the percentage of people who don't use other solutions (even if the
> decision isn't technical) is quite higher than elsewhere.
>
>> Centralization is not inherently worse in terms of robustness. Full
>> p2p architectures would have their own problems.
>
> I absolutely agree on that, as I wrote in the "thoughts on physical
> production..." piece already linked.
>
> Marco
> --
> Your own civil rights and the quality of your life heavily depend on how
> software is used *around* you:            http://digifreedom.net/node/84
>
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-- 

Marc Fawzi
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