Email Providers and Pubnix

Cdmnky talks about email providers [0]. I tried protonmail briefly but
deleted my account, it seemed to me to be a bit gimmicky, and less
than useful without direct imap support.

I use and heartily recommend posteo.de. 1 euro a month is a small
price to pay for secure, stable and privacy-conscious email that is
not hosted in the USA. Despite spending more than that on SDF Meta
membership, I don't use SDF email for anything critical. It's too
unstable.

Speaking of SDF, solderpunk has an interesting essay on SDF and ideas
for federated pubnix [1].

    "Two: let your users help.  One of SDF's biggest problems is
    that the user to admin ratio results in a crippling workload for
    the people in charge, which leads to things falling apart.  SDF
    is full of dedicated and responsible people who've been there
    for years and would love to help lighten the load, but there is
    just no interest in this from on top, as far as I can tell.
    Done properly, this doesn't just lighten the load, it improves
    response time by making sure that the people with the power to
    fix problems are those who are affected by them!  Nobody wants
    SDF's gopher server to run smoothly more than the phloggers, and
    nobody wants aNONradio to run smoothly more than the aNONradio
    DJs.  But those people - even the ones who have been
    contributing for years and years - have no more control over
    those systems than somebody who just signed up yesterday.  Long
    serving, reliable generators of high quality content are a
    digital community's most valuable asset."

Hear, hear. I and many others have offered our help at SDF over the
years, only to have our offers of assistance ignored. As a sustaining
SDF member for over 11 years now, I've helped out when I could by
ghupdating documentation, answering questions, validating new users and
even donating cash. But my power to help most times is quite limited,
even more so when the underlying infrastructure keeps changing without
warning, something that invalidates tutorials, FAQs and welcome
emails. After a while you just don't help anymore, because it seems
pointless.

[0] gopher://sdf.org/0/users/cdmnky/phlog/2018/C0
[1] gopher://circumlunar.space/0/~solderpunk/phlog/on-sdf-and-the-future-of-public-access-unix.txt