tate

That’ll do too!

I don’t really believe this is possible, but I can dream:

Maybe this is the death knell for tinyflaccid?

Libre Office didn’t mesh with Mint

That’s not a thing. Do you mean you didn’t mesh with LibreOffice?

This is the internet. Don’t be coming round here stating facts that aren’t true.

Where did you get this weird take on neck beards? Stallman is the archetypal neck beard. I guarantee you he has no subscriptions to anything.

The problems you’re talking about are not problems of hosting email. Hosting email is trivially simple.

The anticompetitive practices of big tech have to be dealt with a different way. Requiring all schools to host their own email would go a very long way to ending one of those practices. You would see the opaque, unresponsive spam filterers disappear overnight.

I’m aware of all of that, but wasn’t looking to write a novel about it.

I am of the opinion that feeding students’ information to AI and to advertising algorithms is not a legitimate educational purpose. Particularly when hosting your own email that doesn’t do that is so trivially simple.

ETA: btw, my nickname is potateo. You could say that’s an arcane spelling of potato!

In the US we have a law that says we must keep student records confidential. Yet at my school our email for both faculty and students is provided by TinyFlaccid. I know for a fact that they are scanning and indexing all of that email because that’s the only way they could make reply suggestions. They also have copilot enabled and there is no way to turn it off.

or, hear me out, off and then…

I wonder if it would be possible to filter traffic by limiting the rate at which links can be followed after the initial connection.

I suppose one problem with that is it would also limit the crawlers you want, like search engine indexing. Maybe if enough sites were doing this it would generate some pressure on the AI companies to behave better.

If you can give a reference to any such book, I’d be very interested to see it.

kernel != operating system

For better or worse the more correct name GNU/Linux did not catch on and is universally shortened to Linux. Android uses the Linux kernel, but is not GNU/Linux, and therefore is not Linux.