I had this revelation while setting up Fedora 39 on one of these “mini PCs”. I wasn’t looking for something fancy, certainly nothing that involves “AI” or that processes my emails on other people’s servers. (And, definitely, not one that costs me US$ 30/month, lol.) All I’m asking is an app with a good UX and sane defaults and keyboard shortcuts compatible with IMAP and SMTP. Is that too much to ask?

Before going through Linux, I started the pre-installed Windows 11 to take a look at the “new” Outlook, Microsoft’s surrender to the elephant in the room, the webmail.

If you use Windows and have not yet had the misfortune to come across the new Outlook, it’s just a wrapper for web Outlook. Good for Microsoft, for its 766 partners who get data from users, and that’s it. No, it’s not good for you or me.

Windows trashed, I installed the default Fedora, with Gnome DE, and started my via crucis on Linux email apps. First stop: the good and old Thunderbird.

Even with the visual redesign in progress, Thunderbird still feels… weird. There are many buttons all around, keyboard shortcuts different from the OS, and it’s visually so out of place. Several of these problems are common to Firefox, but for reasons I can’t explain Firefox doesn’t give me that feeling. Could I get used to it? Yes, yet a little grudgingly. It works. Let’s test other apps before sticking to this one.

The next on the list was Evolution, a kind of Gnome’s equivalent to Thunderbird: it handles email, calendar, task lists, notes. (Only messages via Matrix were missing, something that Thunderbird got not long ago.) With a little patience you can remove the excesses of buttons and bars and make Evolution more pleasant, or less ugly. Not at an ideal level, because there’s a lot going on at the same time, but ok, it’s not that bad at all.

The next app, Geary, is what looks most like Apple Mail. Simple, focused on email, good keyboard shortcuts (although lacking a few), it’s more or less what you can expect of a modern email app.

The problem is that Geary suffers from some unjustifiable issues at this point. The worst of them is the fixed columns.

For reasons that perhaps not even God explains, it’s not possible to resize its main columns. To make matters worse, the middle column is almost the same width as the message’s, even on big displays.

This has been the situation since April 2021. Geary’s history is rough, with some periods of no maintenance. This issue, however, is a regression. It wasn’t like that and it could never have been like that.

I got to the extreme of testing Claws before ending my spin by email apps. I like it and I only write emails in plain text, so… why not? Maybe I would adapt with dedication and patience to improve its appearance (the ugliest of all, by far) and messing with plugins and so on, but I have no time nor willing to do that.

Have most people migrated to webmail on computers, apps only on phones? For those who use an email app on their computers: which one? Did I forget to test any? I’m all ears.

This means that Substack hosts, promotes and makes money from Nazi newsletters.

On December 21, the three co-founders of Substack posted a note saying they do not intend to moderate such newsletters, except when they incite violence.

For Chris Best, Hamish McKenzie, and Jairaj Sethi, banning, limiting revenue sources or even not promoting Nazi newsletters would be the same as censoring them, which, in their view, would only make the problem worse.

“We believe that supporting individual rights and civil liberties while subjecting ideas to open discourse is the best way to strip bad ideas of their power,” they wrote.

For this twisted logic, the six million Jews murdered by Nazis in the Holocaust lacked persuasion.

***

Substack is covered by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CTA), the American 1996 law that exempts online platforms from liability for what their users publish.

Contrary to other countries, in the United States, where Substack is based, Nazi manifestations aren’t a felony.

Meta, TikTok, the old Twitter, and other online platforms at least try (or pretend) to moderate illicit or questionable content on their own for two reasons: public perception and money.

Most people and governments around the world do not like to share space with declared Nazis, racists and other bad guys. On the other hand, companies do not want to have their ads served next to reprehensible content, a scenario that puts their brands and revenue at risk.

By its business model, Substack only needs to worry about the first group — or not even that, as you can see.

The startup does not depend on advertising, that is, on other companies, to make money. It only does when people subscribed to newsletters hosted there become paying subscribers. For intermediation, it grabs 10% of the gross revenue.

Still, Substack’s content guidelines forbids incitement to violence.

“Offending behavior includes credible threats of physical harm to people based on their race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, disability or medical condition,” it reads.

For the co-founders of Substack, however, violence is not a value inherent in Nazi ideology, and this is less dangerous than pornography, another type of content forbidden by the guidelines and that, unlike Nazism, is promptly banned.

In the past, Substack used the argument that it offers infrastructure not to moderate content. To use the example of Casey Newton, a technology journalist and owner of one of Substack’s most prominent newsletters, the startup would be what Microsoft is in relation to Word: no one blames it or demands measures from Microsoft when someone writes a Nazi manifesto in Word.

Today, this argument is not sustainable. The moment Substack starts promoting newsletters and launches a Twitter clone with a feed based on a recommendation algorithm, the service changes. It’s no longer infrastructure, it’s a platform. And with that, it attracts to itself the need to moderate content.

***

It’s no surprise that some people who bet on Substack are uncomfortable with the situation. That it’s not new, it’s worth remembering. In April 2023, Chris Best, co-founder and CEO of Substack, said in a podcast that the service accepts racist newsletters.

More than 240 people who use Substack, many of them renowned, signed an open letter to the founders of Substack asking them to reconsider their position in relation to Nazi newsletters.

Casey Newton has met with the startup management and has already warned that if nothing changes, he will leave Substack.

There are other newsletter services, that is, there is nothing preventing someone from leaving Substack. For those who are established and already have many subscribers, it’s a valid path. For the rest of us, it’s complicated.

If your newsletter hosted on Substack is free of charge, as in if you don’t offer paid subscriptions, the service is also free for your and without limitations.

No competitor can offer such conditions because they are unsustainable. They only work there because of venture capital infusions and a crowdfunding ran in early 2023. Until when, no one knows. I suspect that, when only they are left using the Substack, the few Nazis writes that the co-founders are protecting now will not be able to pay the bill.

However, without prior notice, SMT was sold to ZipoApps. On its website, the company says they “acquire the best apps and take them to the next level”, which is only true if by “next level” they mean “charge expensive subscriptions for no reason”.

Contributors are upset with Tibor Kaputa, founder of SMT, and question whether the project license, GPLv3, even allows a sale without the consent of everyone who contributed to the code ever. There was even talk of bring the issue to the Justice in order to stop the deal.

On GitHub, a long conversation is unfolding, where Tibor confirmed the sale and kind of justified it:

Right, I know that it is a really controversial step that upset many users, sadly the quality of the whole Android ecosystem is dropping really quickly recently and I wanted to avoid slow death. Thanks a lot for the support that me and the apps received over the years, it means a lot to me :)

The craziest thing about this story is that on August, the SMT blog was pushing critical posts to apps that sell user data. A year ago, Timor launched SMT’s own phone (!) with the apps pre-installed.

ZipoApps explains, on its website, that selling an app to them “takes three easy steps” and that “most of our deals are closed within 14 days”.

One of the project contributors, Naveen Singh, forked SMT into a project called FossifyX, and promised to keep SMT going and adherent to its principles. Great for those who are involved, but this doesn’t solve the issue for those who will soon come across popups asking for double-digit weekly subscriptions and will be tracked by shady ad companies ion apps that, so far, were paradigms of pro-privacy best practices.

Every now and then, I have the feeling that these behind the scenes of non-central apps in our lives are almost a curiosity, almost a hobby of mine and a few people who gather in places like Hacker News. The last few days, with this Simple Mobile Tools story, Evernote’s free plan debacle, and Castro’s four-day outage and rumors of a soon to be made shutdown, have shown that it’s not quite like that… right?

Today, however, we all feel the influence of the ephemeral messaging app. Stories, Snapchat’s legacy to humanity, reject a maxim of the commercial internet: that all data must be kept forever.

The ephemeral in digital is an unintuitive concept. With storage prices falling and the promises of new technologies capable of extracting insights from large volumes of data — big data, machine learning, LLMs! —, turning your back on data becomes an almost subversive attitude.

Maybe it’s. If it’s… so what? It’s also liberating. And it can be economical. There are advantages to not being a digital hoarder.

It took a while for other companies and apps to embrace the ephemerality as the standard, that concept brought by Snapchat.

In the main messaging apps outside the US — WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram — you can set a default duration for messages in a conversation. Put another way, the default is that messages are temporary, that they automatically disappear after a few days, weeks or months.

In the field of privacy, the two largest digital advertising companies, Google and Meta, instrumentalized the ephemeral to placate criticism of their business model of aggressive data collection to target ads.

It’s been a while that it’s possible to turn off or set an automatic deletion period for some types of data that both companies collect, store and use to show us ads.

I always suspect the intentions of Google and Meta. It’s likely that that feature has only been released because old data is no longer valuable in their modern digital advertising systems. Still, it’s a good change!

I propose we go further.

In 2004, Google launched Gmail with a challenge: that no one would ever need to delete an email due to lack of storage.

When I open my email settings (which is not Gmail), I see ~100k messages sitting there. It’s a lot, and much of it, I’m sure, dispensable.

What if the email was ephemeral by default? If archived messages were automatically deleted after… say, a year?

The original promise of Gmail was broken. Coincidence or not, in 2019 many users began to hit the 15 GB ceiling that Google gives to free accounts. From there, just paying a monthly fee would enable someone to continue ignoring the email delete button.

Self-deleting emails would save us from this hassle, keeping the storage occupied by messages under control.

That goes for everything. Subscriptions to cloud storage services — Google Drive, iCloud, OneDrive, Dropbox — are, for many, almost mandatory at this point. Do we need so much space for so many files that we will never open again?

What I propose is not an absolute change, but a new default procedure. Of course, there are files that need to be preserved, whether for affective, historical, professional or legal reasons.

But these files, which need to be preserved, are exceptions. Or they should be. Instead of saving everything, the new default would be to delete everything except what matters.

The main findings:

• “The median reported renewable electricity procurement rate for the 11 electronics suppliers in the ranking was 20% in 2022, compared to 10% for the same 11 companies in 2021.”
• Only 4 of the 11 committed to the goal of decarbonizing their supplier networks by 2050. For 2030, only Intel made the promise.
• Foxconn has the highest reported rates of emissions and energy consumption in the final manufacture of the ranking. In 2022, the company’s emissions exceeded those of Iceland — and with only 8% of energy coming from renewable sources.
• Samsung Electronics received the worst score among semiconductor manufacturers (D+). No manufacturer got a score higher than C+.

The full report can be read here (PDF).

Apple has business with all of 11 suppliers analyzed by Greenpeace.

In October, Apple drew attention by announcing its first “carbon neutral” product, a specific model of Apple Watch combined with a few bands.

The claim was contested by the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs (IPE), a non-profit institution in China that, a year earlier, had received praise from Apple. The IPE accused the company of lacking transparency about the supply chain of its products.

That wasn’t the only problem with Apple’s and other polluting companies claims of being or becoming carbon neutral.

Unfortunately, it’s not like Apple has figured out a way to make its smartwatch suck CO2 out of the atmosphere. Neutrality was achieved, as expected, with the purchase of carbon credits — the equivalent of 7–12 kg per watch, according to the Financial Times.

These credits, according to Apple itself, are from projects in Latin America and use “international standards” of certification of the so-called voluntary (or unregulated) market, including those of Verra, which an investigation by The Guardian found that ~90% of the credits did not represent any actual reduction in the emission of greenhouse gases.

The operation of carbon credits in the voluntary market is bizarre. Without regulation (and without surprise), incentives turn to maximizing profit — once again, the tail of capitalism shakes the dog, or the environment.

The history of the Lake Kariba forest in Zimbabwe, told in the New Yorker, is a good example of these erratic incentives in the carbon credit market in full force. (If you find the article too long, Matt Levine made a good and fun summary in his column.)

Brazil represents another chronic problem of the voluntary market, with the allotment of public land by the so-called “carbon cowboys” in the Amazon, as shown by Sumaúma.

Carbon credits are sold as the solution to the paradox of sustaining economic growth without worsening the climate catastrophe. If it seems too good to be true, it’s because it’s not.

• Mail Client: Mail.app
• Mail Server: Fastmail and Zoho Mail
• Notes: Simplenote and *.txt files
• To-Do: Apple Reminders
• Photo Management: iCloud Photos
• Calendar: Apple Calendar
• Cloud File Storage: iCloud
• RSS: Miniflux @ NetNewsWire
• Browser: Safari
• Chat: Signal, Element X (Matrix), Telegram, and WhatsApp
• Bookmarks: Linkding
• Read It Later: Instapaper
• Word Processing: Text Editor (macOS default app; does it count?)
• Spreadsheets: Apple Numbers Budgeting and Personal Finance: Apple Numbers
• News: Artifact, newspapers sites
• Music: Apple Music
• Podcasts: Apple Podcasts
• Password Management: MacPass (macOS), KeePassium (iOS)
• Backup: rclone + Backblaze B2

There are a lot of Apple apps and services, a side effect of using macOS and iOS as main OSs. I hope to improve on that someday.

A year is a short time, I agree, but at this point one was to expect at least signs that a turnaround is underway or at least feasible. The signs exist, but in the opposite direction.

In a year under Musk’s control, Twitter deteriorated, became unrecognizable. Not only by the name change, to the meaningless, stupid “X“. We saw in real time, day after day, the merciless dismantling of a beloved company, of much of what was built in almost two decades.

Musk made his fortune with startups at the turn of the millennium and later became the richest person in the world with the surge of Tesla stock, an automaker he co-founded, manages and that spearheaded the electrification of cars, the new self-deception of the automobile industry in the fight against the climate emergency.

Musk’s business (he is also CEO of SpaceX and owns The Boring Company), until then, kind of shielded him from the general public. It leaked only the image of the entrepreneurial genius making bold business decisions, sometimes merciless, but that resulted in innovative, futuristic and, most importantly, profitable solutions.

Let’s be fair: just someone very crazy, naive or genius (or all three things at the same time) to make simultaneous bets on electric cars and private space exploration in the early 2000s, and win both.

But Twitter is a different business. The quick posts for a huge audience, with the power to promptly answer, amplify and, sometimes, massacre the messenger, expose the soul of those who let themselves be consumed by this dynamic. It’s an addiction. Twitter is digital cocaine; Musk is a Twitter addict.

This comes from before the acquisition. Some of the biggest controversies in which he got himself into happened in the form of irresponsible posts on Twitter.

Like when he called (without proof) a pedophile a diver involved in the rescue of boys trapped in a cave in Thailand, or announced that he had money to take Tesla private (he did not have).

Musk’s rude pragmatism may work to build cars and launch rockets into the stratosphere, but it does not serve for speech. And Twitter, before being a technology company, is a company that promotes relationships between people. Communication.

Were there bad things on the old Twitter? Absolutely. Twitter was and is somewhat successful despite the direction of the company. It’s always been like that, it still is. But, as they say, nothing is so bad that it can’t get worse.

Listing the disasters of Musk management is unfeasible — this article would become a book. Below, I picked up only two of the most notorious for illustrative purposes.

The blue verification badge/checkmark was emblematic of the problems of the old Twitter: confusing, uncertain, but to some extent functional. At the very least, it served to distinguish people of high visibility.

Musk turned the blue check into a cheap product. Anyone can have it, just pay USD 8/month. By becoming a product and incorporating a kind of “turbo” into Twitter’s algorithm, the meaning of the badge was lost. When it became a source of revenue based on viralization, it became a weapon.

Nowadays, many pay for the badge to amplify angry speeches and misinformation. A recent survey by NewsGuard, for instance, found that 74% of viral misinformation posts related to the Israel/Hamas war were published by verified profiles.

It’s funny that one of the newest benefits of the paid Twitter subscription is to hide the verification badge. In a year, it went from a proud, desirable perk to a toxic one.

The other disaster was that of advertising, which before Musk was bringing ~US$ 5 billion a year to Twitter. A lot? Little? Everything is relative, but it was good money that paid the bills.

The exodus from the advertising market, which is sensitive to controversy, was justified. Musk unbanned extremists and Nazis banned from Twitter by old the old Twitter, people who until then only found space on the fringes of digital society.

No serious company wants to take the risk of seeing its brand next to this type of content.

With all its flaws, or perhaps because of them, the old Twitter was a kind of target of the most strident elites and politicians, which lives by fighting with windmills.

Musk is just another one of those noisy, provocative extremists. What sets him apart from the others is that he has a lot of money.

The new Twitter, or X, is the full realization of the crazy ideas of delusional, resentful, and powerful people, a reactionary dystopia with no room for nuances, where money trumps everything — except Musk himself.

A lot of people got excited. Among them, Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic. In a conversation on Twitter, Matt announced that Tumblr, owned by his company, would get ActivityPub compatibility.

Almost a year later, nobody talks about it anymore and it seems Matt’s promise succumbed to project issues and lack of interest.

In July, someone replied to Matt’s original post and asked if Automattic was still working on integrating ActivityPub with Tumblr.

“It’s a little depressing to think Facebook of all companies might beat you to it”, he said, referring to Mark Zuckerberg’s promise — also not yet fulfilled — to bring ActivityPub to Threads.

“Yeah 😕”, Matt replied. “They are orders of magnitude bigger and better capitalized than us. Not an excuse, just reality.”

The reality, however, may be a little worse than Matt’s answer implied.

A few days after this exchange, Javier Álvarez López, a software engineer from Spain, former Automattic employee, suggested on Mastodon that the project to bring ActivityPub to Tumblr had been shelved.

According to his LinkedIn profile, Javier left the team responsible for Tumblr in May and, in September, left Automattic. Today, he holds a position at Yoast, a popular SEO plugin for WordPress.

Then, Javier echoed a post by Cyle Gage, a Tumblr product person, answering a reader’s question on his blog.

“Matt [Mullenweg] announced it impromptu in a single tweet and never talked about it again”, they wrote. “I just assumed it’s been canned now, or at least, significantly delayed, is there a reason activitypub integration was never properly announced on tumblr?”

Cyle’s complete answer was:

it’s been delayed, but it’s something in our list for @labs and we’re evaluating it.

my concern, re: activitypub, is that while federation is a really great idea, it’s never had a good product. it doesn’t really fulfill a widespread need, it’s very niche. nobody is joining threads or bluesky because it will federate someday. so i don’t think it would help grow tumblr at all. actually i think it would likely end up costing more than it makes, which is a concern.

but stay tuned!

In another post on Mastodon, Javier revealed the behind the scenes of Matt’s untimely announcement:

I was working for tumblr when the Twitter thing happened and we scrambled to put together a project. I was the one supposed to do all the web UI work.

Once my backend counterpart did some initial investigation and scoping, and it became obvious it was a complex task and that it would become a cost center without any chance to generate any cashflow, the project was quietly put on long-term hold.

In 2023, Automattic acquired an ActivityPub plugin then in development for WordPress, hired its developer, Matthias Pfefferle, and together they have already released a 1.0/stable version.

In October, they released the integration with ActivityPub to all WordPress.com blogs, Automattic’s commercial WordPress hosting arm.

Tumblr users, on the other hand, are still waiting for the ability to talk to Mastodon and other fediverse users.

The billionaire’s two recommendations are notorious sources of misinformation. In May, they spread the lie that the White House had been bombed, for instance.

Upon noting the gaffe, Musk deleted the post. Before that, it had accumulated +11 million views.

It was only a matter of time — and a dramatic event — for Twitter’s decay to reveal itself in the worst possible way. Over the course of almost a year, Musk’s wrong incentives and disastrous serial decisions turned Twitter into one of the worst places to get trustful information.

Activists and OSINT experts are wasting precious time debunking video game images and old videos, reposted on Twitter to direct narratives and/or earn money with the (bad) revenue sharing program implemented by Musk.

It’s not that digital misinformation has emerged now or is it exclusive to Twitter. It’s just that, there, it’s out of control.

In almost a year, Musk fired ~75% of Twitter employees, dismissed all the thousands of contractors who moderated content, trashed the press, empowered extremist speeches, and created the worst incentives for misinformation to flourish on the platform.

The situation is so serious and peculiar that Thierry Breton, Commissioner of the European Union, published an “urgent letter”, in a harsh tone, pointing out Twitter violations of the Digital Services Act and demanding action from Musk within 24 hours.

Twitter, nowadays, is what all alt/extremist social media — Gab, Truth Social, Parler — have always dreamed of: a space frequented by millions of people, controlled by an extremist himself, and where money and truculence speak louder in a supposed “cultural war” that would be underway.

A lot of good people are still on Twitter, among other (few) reasons, “to get informed”. I’m sorry to say, but the old Twitter no longer exists and what’s left in its place is not good for that.

With information from the Associated Press and Wired.

In the investigation, Kate found that the channels do this with looking for advertising revenue that Google shares with youtubers.

Despite the bad taste, at first there is nothing illegal in it — at least in the United States. People do weird things to earn easy money.

YouTube’s revenue sharing program has been around for a long time and is a success. It helped to launch small audiovisual empires and establish strong names in the digital influence market.

More than that, it is the realization of something that many activists ask: that the work done by ordinary people on social media benefit all parties, not only companies.

It’s a fair claim, even if it’s not universal. And there may be the mistake of some (all?) Silicon Valley entrepreneurs: believing that money is a universal motivator, the only one that matters.

The fact that YouTube is a de facto monopoly, the only viable place to distribute videos of medium duration in landscape format, should be considered, because it attracts those who do not care or even know about the revenue split.

In other places, this may not be the case.

At the end of September, Reddit announced a similar program, in which users buy credits to pass on to others who post cool things. Along the way, Reddit gets +50% of the money.

Reddit was one of the few places where the motivation to exchange ideas and knowledge was genuine. Not by chance, people started to add “reddit” in Google search queries to get away from posts made for SEO (that is, encouraged by money) and read the disinterested opinions of ordinary people.

Will things continue like this, once there is a financial incentive? Hard to say.

In X, former Twitter, there is now a brazen effort to keep users within the platform, with the promotion of direct content publishing and the implosion of link cards’ layout.

The lure for content creators, journalists, and newspapers to do this? Money. X is giving part of its waning advertising revenue to some paying users with a large audience — without transparent criteria or logic.

Commercial social networks, already dominated by advertising content and by people who have become brands, are lacking in genuine interactions. They lost space for the controversies that go viral and that give money on X, for the “finds” that convert generous commissions from stores eager to reduce customer acquisition costs, to the big business of the internet.

When the place we go to becomes a big mall, we can only play the role of consumers.

People feel that. Hence the search for refuge in messaging apps, where it is still possible to have some intimacy without a flashing ad (or a scam attempt) trying to win or deceive us.

This breather shouldn’t last long. Meta has already felt the blood in the water and has begun to instrumentalize its messaging apps, including WhatsApp.