email is pretty cool

27 Jun, 2025

Before joining bearblog I used to not be the biggest fan of email. I mainly just used mine to sign up to stuff and get spammed with notifications & newsletters for things I don't care about. I didn't view it as a medium for communication, i viewed it as a nuisance.

That changed once i started using bear and saw how many people on here used email as their primary form of communication. And once i started using it as well and cleaned up my inbox from all the spam i kept getting, i realized - I actually really love email. It's nice to be able to take things slower. When you get mail, you're not expected to reply immediately. You can take your time - it's not as fast-paced as other social media. When you give someone your Instagram, they might have to make an account and agree to the TOS so they can communicate with you.¹ Same for every other social media. But email? Everyone already has an email. It makes things so much more frictionless.

It's also not controlled by any one entity - it's an open standard. You don't have to worry about some corporation getting too greedy and making email suck really hard. With social media, you're at the whims of whoever is running the platform.

Email doesn't try to maximize engagement. It knows it's a tool. You open your inbox, check if you've got mail and that's that. No intrusive notifications, no dark patterns. Just the stuff you actually need.

Only problem is that most people's inbox gets cluttered up with all kinds of garbage from the twenty services they signed up to but forgot about, putting them off of email and just viewing it as a way to sign up for stuff. Buuut, that can be resolved fairly quickly if you just sit down for a bit and block all the adresses you don't wanna get mail from.

So, yeah. Email is pretty cool.