You may have posted about this before, but im very curious about you saying "email was a mistake" because it's such a cemented part of online communication. Is it the technology?
Email became infrastructural in a way that it was never intended to be and wasn't designed for.
There is too much momentum toward email being the primary means of business communication that unless there is a massive technology shift we're unlikely to see wide adoption of an alternative and email takes up so much space in the IT space that it's hard to say what the alternative would be.
Much of what used to be email now happens in company chat apps, which I think is an improvement in many ways, but you chat with your coworkers in a way that you're unlikely to chat with a client or send a quote to a prospect.
A huge amount of effort goes into making email better, and making email systems talk to each other, and making email secure because it is so ubiquitous that you can't realistically ask people not to use it.
But it's fucking terrible and we're asking too much of a set of protocols that was supposed to send small, not-very-private, communications between academics.
Why can't you send big files via email? Because that's not what email is for.
Why is it a pain in the ass to send encrypted emails? Because that's not what email is for.
Why aren't your emails portable, and easy to move from one service to another? Because that's not what email is for.
Why are emails so easy to spoof? Because they were never meant to be used the way we use them so there was no reason to safeguard against that fifty years ago
It's like how social security cards were never meant to be used as one of your major super serious government IDs where all of your activity through all of your life is tracked, because if they knew they needed a system for that they probably would have built a better one in the first place.
Nobody who sat down and developed email looked more than half a century into the future and went "so people are going to be using this system to create identities to access banking and medical records and grocery shopping and school records so we'd better make sure that it's robust enough to handle all of that" because instead they were thinking "Neat! I can send a digital message to someone on a different computer network than the one that I am literally in the same building as."
We think of email as, like, a piece of certified mail that is hand delivered in tamperproof packaging to only the intended recipient who signs for it with their thumbprint and a retina scan when it is, instead, basically a postcard.
It would be absurd to try to do the things people do with email with postcards, and it's *nearly* as absurd to try to do them via email.
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