Comment by jjav

> Email is still completely open.

Yes, fortunately. Email should always be used, at least as an available option, because it is the only truly open way to communicate electronically.

Recently I bought something and had some hiccups getting it to work and found that the vendor only provides support in one single place: discord. A proprietary platform I can't get access to.

> Even Usenet still exists. There may be more people on it now than there were in the 80s, just because it was so tiny then.

I still read usenet most days ;-)

But no, it is very small compared to the good times. It would take me hours to read through my list of newsgroups in 1990, now at most 10 minutes.