"But hey, "open source all things" have decided I must use 4 products from 4 different providers to send an receive emails so that I am "safe"."
Depends. For my mother? She is fine with gmail. But an IT savvy person should consider having their own email domain. And why not host your own rss reader and a few other things. It is rarely a good idea to buy this out of one hand. So domain registrar (e.g. internet.bs ), email hosting (e.g. infomaniak.com ) and hosting (e.g. nearlyfreespeech.net ). So we are close to your 4 different providers.
"Products should just work the way they are intended to be."
Until they don't. Until you get blocked (try calling google email customer service). Or until they go bankrupt. Your license? Sorry, the server for license validation does not exist anymore. Or until somebody decides what you can do with the product and what not. Doing your own thing and using open source gives your freedom.
if you don't pay for the product you are the product.
> But an IT savvy person should consider having their own email domain.
Having email domain is different than hosting your own email servers. And even that - why would I care so much? There are plenty of articles here on HN of people telling how hard it is to host your own email servers.
Plus, tech-savvy doesn't mean I want to waste 2 hours a week updating managing servers etc., while I could maybe learn ... "Flutter"? Or technology X. Or something else completely different.
In general, assuming what a group of people should or shouldn't do seems pretty naive to me.
> if you don't pay for the product you are the product.
I pay for Fastmail and it works. Until when? I can't tell - I hope they don't go bankrupt. But they offer a good service, decent price, and it gives me 1-2 hours of life back per week or month.
I understand your counterarguments, however nowadays there is enough variety that enables us to use products and services for quite some time. Even open source can get you into "vendor" lock-in, especially when a tool or product doesn't evolve anymore and the community doesn't have interest or manpower to improve it.
I said buy email as a hosted service. I consider myself IT savvy but I am not a CS guy. I tried hosting my own email before and I can assure you, if you are not absolutely sure you know what you are doing (inc. spam, greylisting, blacklisting etc.). DONT DO IT. I would possibly even be impossible to send email to services like t-online if you really host your own email.
Products should just work the way they are intended to be. Apple built an empire on this simple concept.
But hey, "open source all things" have decided I must use 4 products from 4 different providers to send an receive emails so that I am "safe".