So... PLATO user, Notes user and Thunderbird user here with a
couple of notes.
a. Everything you think is new was created in the 1960s by Don
Bitzer @ UIUC or Doug Engelbart @ SRI. (and probably also
Robert Creasy @ IBM.)
b. Lotus Notes (and Groove) were products, not protocols. If
you wanted to use them, you used Windows and the server and
client from the vendor.
c. Lotus Notes only sort of worked over the intarwebs. It had
serious problems traversing firewalls, and technically worked
over VPNs, but was nearly unusable as it required you to
either replicate your AD server or use AD over the VPN (I do
not recommend the latter option.)
d. Like JIRA, in order to do anything interesting with Lotus
Notes, you effectively had to have admin privileges. This
isn't strictly true, but it's effectively true. Both JIRA
and Lotus Notes were designed for organizations whose thinky
bits were managed centrally. Have a site or department
specific process? Better schedule time with your admin to
talk about how they're going to model your work-flow because
there's no way you're going to be able to build it yourself.
Groove was a little better, but it was disturbingly easy for
the brittle XML based DTDs used to model data to become out
of sync between users. Guess it's time to restore from
backup.
e. As much as I loved PLATO, it was a centralized / mainframe
type system. Of course it was easy to coordinate via a notes
file, it was a single file on a centrally shared,
non-replicated volume that (usually) had very loose write
permissions.
The reason notes (or it's bastard offspring Lotus Notes)
didn't take over the world was it put all the thinky bits in
one place, probably locked down by a BOFH. There's little we
learned from the micro-computer revolution from the 70s and
80s, but what we did seem to get is we all hated being
dependent on that one guy from accounting to write a few
COBOL programs for us so we could see what our sales figures
looked like this month.
It seems weird we're comparing PLATO NOTES with Lotus Notes
email. PNOTES (Personal Notes) was the equivalent of email.
NOTES was more the equivalent of Usenet News.
And Notes was an application environment w/ data replication
that had a shim layer on top of it that looked like an email
system. It was more like Hypercard with git-ish semantics.
(Which now that I think about it, wouldn't be that bad of a
product.)
But... after more than 50 years in tech, I still use Thunderbird
as my email client. If I could figure out a way to get it to
turn off HTML mail I would. I'm on the vanguard of the orange
catholic butlerian jihad. Not only do I seek a prohibition of
thinking machines, I'm also quite suspcious of richly formatted
text.
Maybe the reason (Lotus) Notes failed was that people kept
thinking of it as an email client. Raymond Lowey talked about
the "Most Advanced Yet Acceptable" principle. Meaning you can
push product design only so far before people no longer
understand how they're expected to integrate it into their
lives. Lotus Notes was the poster child for this concept.
I worked with Notes for 15 years, and your point C baffles me. Could you please elaborate?
I still remember the Notes/Domino Server TCP port number - 1352. I've used it so often in firewall configurations or communications with customers and firewall teams.
I had servers hosting data for replication to customers over the internet. (Including patent data, very sensitive in both security and timeliness). We never had any issues connecting servers over the internet. It was easy, reliable and simple.
It was also very secure due to the PKI infrastructure built into Notes, the ability to require encrypted network traffic, and the various layers of security on the server.
Plus the NRPC protocol has its own proxying feature, called "Passthru Servers". That allows clients or servers to connect to other servers via an intermediate server - and that intermediate can actually blacklist or whitelist other clients/servers from using it. It's all very easy to implement, a core part of the product that any Notes administrator should know about.
But what really confuses me is you talking about AD. You can do some integration with AD and Lotus Notes, but out of the box it uses its own directory and PKI infrastructure. That's famously one of the things people held against it - that it didn't use AD or NDS. If you did turn on the AD integration then I guess you'd need access to AD, but that's your decision - and the downsides of it are much the same for any local client software you're trying to authenticate via your AD.
I simply can't reconcile what you've said with my experience. So I'm very interested to understand what you're getting at there.
> But... after more than 50 years in tech, I still use Thunderbird as my email client. If I could figure out a way to get it to turn off HTML mail I would.
I literally can't order medication at the moment because I need a 2FA from my email; which I pay them for. It seems pretty inexcusable to me (as someone who does a lot of SRE work) that they got bitten twice by the same incident, but I guess I'll wait for the next post-mortem before I decide to switch or not. SLA or not, it's a great way to lose the faith your customers had built up in you.
Looks like it came back up after about 4(?) hours. I noticed there was a "special offer" to extend my subscription for about half the price. I think what I want is to pay more for something that looks vaguely like an SLA. Or maybe even a description of how they have two data centers and their fail-over process is tested frequently.
I switched to Tuta this morning. I used to be a huge Proton advocate but multiple hour-plus downtimes in a week for e-mail is unacceptable. At this point I had better uptime running my own mail server on a VPS (or at least when the UI went down it was a simple `systemctl restart` away to fix it) and this was in the dark ages of having to manually rotate X.509 certs.
What? You have to run Bridge on your desktop to get the functionality anyhow... if they offered it natively then it might be worth something but you have to run a binary to get it. Meanwhile Proton's mobile app has gotten buggier and buggier over the years as it refuses to load messages, loads old messages in a thread when you click on the most recent notification, forgets to remove drafts after sending, fails to sync the calendar, etc.
Lumo, which could have been a great offering, similarly breaks after every fifth message or so and is substantially behind SOTA offerings. IMHO Proton has jumped the shark and this is just the final straw.
Do you know if they have multiple data centers and can fail-over when one barfs? I'm willing to pay a little extra for a SLA. Also, cyberinsider.com thinks Fastmail is in bed w/ the feds cause they have data centers in the states. Is that accurate? meh. I dunno.
They do have fallback, they keep backups in the US. So if you want backup / data EU sovereignty it’s not really going to cut it. I don’t remember them having an outage the last many years… nothing that affected me at least.
If you want to stay entirely outside of the reach of the US gov, stick with Proton and eat the outages. If you are willing to take on some more risk, try Fastmail. Consider the subject comms and whether higher risk comms should instead be in something like Signal.
The "funny" think is I came to HN to search for "proton" to see if anyone had any more info and hn.algolia.com gave me a 502. It's a tough day to be a vibe coded internet service. Fortunately, the 502 was temporary and I was able to find your comment.
Several years ago I was at a conference in Las Vegas and discovered that one of her "infinity mirror rooms" was on display at... can't remember the exact location... maybe the Bellagio, but one of the major casinos along the strip. I eventually found it, but it was SO out of place -- A moment of art in a sea of crude commerce. Still... I was happy to have seen it. Major props to my spouse who has an uncanny ability to find interesting things, even in Vegas.
I stopped virtually all social media (except commenting on YouTube videos and telling people they're wrong in HN comments) years ago. No twitter, no mastadon, no bsky, no facebook. I keep hearing myspace is going to re-launch and I would consider getting an account there for the purposes of irony.
But... instead of tweeting for an hour a day, I spend that hour reading long form dead tree format texts. I'm not saying this is what you should do, just offering it as an observation that it is an option.
It’s all fine until the entire community you’re trying to participate in decides Twitter is the place to post things.
ahem
Would be great if we maybe chose someplace else to do this as a community… but I guess the eyeballs are there and that’s what is valuable to the folks posting.
Our HOA is forced to use an email mailing list. Enough older people who don't use facebook... and now younger people who refuse. Maybe ask for a show of hands at the next meeting. Sentiments can change overnight. Especially with the meta stuff happening at the moment.
We use a SaaS provider for our HOA and it works well, but there is a monthly / annual cost for that. That said, people still insist on posting to Facebook but the group can easily turn to poison and sniping which is super awesome for being neighborly…
I boycotted with the API nonsense a few years ago and noticed I didn't miss it that much. Haven't really been back since. When a web search leads me back, it seems to have gone downhill with lots of low effort and bot-ish posts.
I pulled back significantly on reddit in that period too. Now I probably look at it 10% tops of what I used to. After being away from it and trying to enjoy looking at it these days... It's not the same as it was and simply not very good now. Most of the good communities died off, closed or got too big, the biggest communities are too big and the quality of posts+comments has plummeted. It feels either overrun with bots or it's the alternative: idiots that post so poorly they appear to be bots.
It was fun while it lasted, but with everything going on it often feels nicer to just not look at the internet and do something else. Rage baiting, copy cat posts and spam have become so common on Insta even that's become harder to enjoy.
It's been wild to see the Dead Internet Theory mature in real time after reading about it like... 15 years or more ago.
I got banned (always for some political stuff, like being too anti trump, anti isreal etc) for the Nth time so i just uninstalled the app. I browse sometimes in bed, but thats only as anon on some libreddit instance. Never poltical stuff, usually just programming and some related subreddits.
yeah i have been doing the same for a few months now.. deleted all social media accounts and blocked sites like reddit, twitter etc., so i don't get into the trap of 'only quickly checking'. hn is the only social media site i still visit.
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