We really need some consumer protections around emails.
Imagine if your landlord could just intercept your mail on the same way.
It's part of our identities.
We're living in the Wild-West of the internet
this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2025
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This tells me LibreOffice has become a threat to Microsoft, and I'm here for it.
If anyone else is curious what it's like, LibreOffice's site is here. Highly recommend.
using Microsoft Word for too long makes me break out in Tourette's
Writer is so much more understandable
Word is proof that there is no God and that we're all alone in the cold vacuum of space. Word is every traffic light being red. Word is getting an itchy arsehole because you couldn't quite wipe yourself properly.
I don't think anything in the software world has ever pissed me off as much as the fucking ribbon. "We've run out of ideas as far as the UI is concerned - just throw everything up there somewhere, menus, toolbars, whatever". A close second was their genius idea of hiding unused menu items so the locations of the items you do use are constantly changing.
I don't use MS products any more but my 90 yo parents do and it's a fucking nightmare trying to help them with stuff. MS Office is certifiable elder abuse.
Office 97 was the last good Office. No auto-adjusting menus, no ribbons, you could actually provide phone support and have confidence that both people were seeing the same thing.
It tells me microsoft is petty
Large corporations have zero empathy for competition.
What will their quarterly report say? Think of the stockholders. (/s)
It's not even that. It's way smaller potatoes down in the org chart.
People always say "why would large company do this" and the answer is almost always that guy 7 or 8 rows down the org chart needs this to get their bonus this year and that point gets distilled into 1 bullet in a power point presentation that is summarized by chatgpt.
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Probably has something to do with more and more things like this happening:
https://cybernews.com/news/france-lyon-microsoft-office-tech-adoption/
Anyone who has projects on Github they care about, you might wanna move it to self-hosting or another git host while you still can, because once MS gets tired of killing e-mails, Github repos are probably going to start getting sniped next.
Even if you stay on GitHub, definitely mirror to another host. Git is designed to be distributed, why not make use of that capability!
codeberg is owned by a nonprofit. highly recommend it
They probably meant purely self hosted. You can self hosted Gitea, Forgejo, GitLab, and probably many others.
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What isn't made clear is if this had anything to do with him being a LibreOffice developer. Or just the usual Kafkaesque bullshit that happens when someone's account gets flagged for "suspicious activity" or whatever and they cannot get a real human being to help or reverse the problem.
Or the terrifyingly-random bullshit that happens when someone chooses to depend on a free service such as Hotmail as their primary mission-critical address. (This article is about the developer getting locked out of their Hotmail, and the generally-broken state of Hotmail's account recovery process.)
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Well now i know Linux is ready to switch over to.
Thanks Microsoft!
This isn't a conspiracy...
It's the reality of using Hotmail as a business account in 2025.
Which is frankly nuts.
But the author even says the same thing happened to them before too
Using Hotmail for anything was already a bad idea, using it for an open-source dev account is worse. I don't understand why they haven't switched to something else 20 years ago.
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95% of senior government officials across Africa will give you a fancy-ass, taxpayer funded, full color laminated plastic business card that lists their email address for official business as Gmail or Hotmail.
Like... Today. Right now. I used to have a collection. Once got one with a 3D hologram thing. Fucking hotmail and gmail address.
Yep, I don't remember the exact phrasing, but in these situations, I assume incompetence before I assume evil intent.
Maybe it is intentional but the incompetence is in how obvious they are.
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No real reason to be using a hotmail account in this day and age, even less so if you're a developer of a direct competitor for Microsoft.
Eh, that's the problem with email - it's much harder to change and migrate, because you can't guarantee others will use your new email, much less find out who somehow still has the old email to send messages to and expects a reply from.
This is an argument for having your own domain for emails. There is an annual cost but at least your address isn't locked to a specific provider sokcd you can change some DNS settings to point at a different mail server.
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Unless you own the domain. Then switching providers is a simple DNS/MX/DKIM/DMARC update.
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What alternative do you recommend that won't be blocked by Google and Microsoft? I hate Microsoft, but I can't even sign up for a Google account, and everywhere else I've tried is blocked by Google, Microsoft, or both.
I self-hosted my email from 2006-2021, and do not have the stamina to do that any more.
If your concern is being blocked, the best advice is to avoid any free email service and pony up for a paid one.
ProtonMail used to be the big one, but IIRC they had some controversy recently:
Other commenter already mentioned Zoho, but also mailbox.org.
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why are people that are building FOSS software not using FOSS software to build it? Gitlab? Forgejo?
People are complicated and FOSS isn't as simple as all or nothing.
Sometimes people have things setup before they discovered FOSS - it's hard for me to give up my gmail account from age 14, even though I run my own domain now.
Sometimes FOSS gets captured - Microsoft owns githib now, which makes tough decisions for all the projects hosted there.
I'm on the outside so forgive me if this is a dumb question, didn't Linus Torvalds create GitHub?
git is a very complex undo/redo tool designed to simultaneously track the changes made to multiple documents by multiple users while being efficient with managing disk space and other resources. (It also has other clever tricks it can do). It was created by Linus Torvalds, current development is led by Junio Hamano.
Chris Wanstrath, P. J. Hyett, Tom Preston-Werner and Scott Chacon made GitHub.com, which was eventually sold to Microsoft. GitHub does two things well: -You can easily clone any project hosted with them to your own git repository using the command 'git clone https://github.com/[Username]/[ProjectName]' -The rest of the public website is basically a looking glass for everything git does under the hood natively (but with a nice webUI instead of a cold command prompt).
Personally I lost faith in GitHub when it started offering Copilot assistant. We're only a two heartbeats away from Microsoft saying that using Copilot for any of your projects code constitutes Microsoft contributed to that project as a precursor to Microsoft saying it basically 'owns' all this open-source stuff. Embrace, extend, extinguish (I recommend everyone run docker and GitTea to create a personal clone store (give your favorite projects insurance) and that all developers move away from GitHub)
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Eat shit, microsoft
Why do I feel like any customer support has been replaced by ai and it has led to this show of shit?
Replaced? They didn't have any in the first place
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Relying on American companies is a liability in of itself.
While there is corruption everywhere and on a standardized basis, there are of course countries with higher levels of corruption, the US is the #1 source of corruption and criminality in the world. Additionally it's the ideological centre for global oligarch/criminal gangs.
Microsoft's monopoly in Windows and Office alone results in extraction of hundreds of billions of dollars from companies and individuals all around the world.
EU should really create rule to use only EU FOSS tech for goverment services. For all member states.
By the way, ignoring as much of this big tech corpo crap as you can also makes you live an easier life.
Whenever I see a story of "some guy who relies on working loses access to it and suddenly can't do anything anymore" I think "this can never happen to me". Which means there's a whole category of problems you're suddenly never going to see. It also means you're less naive. So just don't vendor-lock yourself in. Don't put a log-in for an account which you don't control in front of important things you need to do. Simple as that.
On top of that, you'll also leak less private data about yourself and probably others as well. So you even make yourself less of a target when it comes to data protection laws or something. I know, these get routinely ignored. I'm just saying, if you don't even use the problematic stuff (or almost never), you'll also have potentially less legal troubles at hand. And you never know, legel troubles might not appear for a while but they could lurk far in the future. For example, many Nazis got into legal trouble for their participation in Nazi Germany, even decades later.
I know, the guy from the story probably only needed that account to ensure he can compare some stuff with how MS Office is behaving compared to LibreOffice, or things like that. So it's probably not a big deal. But generally speaking, you really shouldn't vendor-lock yourself in.
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Can someone suggest me good alternatives to both Microsoft's mailing system (Outlook, etc.), and to Github, just in case?
For Outlook as an E-Mail client: I like Claws-Mail or just standard Thunderbird.
For Outlook as an E-Mail Service: Either Self-Host or find a good provider (I have a small German company where I pay 1€/month and get great service)
As an GitHub alternative, I use sourcehut. The link is sr.ht btw
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MS ❤️ Open Source
(/s)
What, Microsoft? The corporation built almost entirely out of copying Apple and buying up competitors to destroy them? Microsoft the convicted monopoly?
Noooooo! It can't be! They're so . . . uh . . . ubiquitous.
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