This terrifies me. I recently signed up for Google One just to mitigate the lack of support if I were to lose access to my account. Perhaps the other thing to do is not comment using my account, which feels very wrong.
All of the other options have drawbacks too. With Fastmail or another provider, you're trusting another corp. Setting up your own involves a bunch of work and difficult to solve drawbacks like spam filtering. I'm also not sure that it's harder to compromise in the grand scheme of things. There are horror stories of people losing domains too.
I think this is a prime case of out of touch governments failing to keep up with regulations. My email is part of my identity at this point and more valuable than any of the plastic that has been assigned to me by the govt. I can't think of much in my life that would be more painful to lose than that email address. Yet, we are all so powerless...
> With Fastmail or another provider, you're trusting another corp.
You're trusting a corp that offers customer support, a service you pay them for. With Gmail you're completely on your own because you're only a small cog in the massive data mining machine. That's a pretty big difference.
That said, it's a good idea to set up a custom domain with a trusted registrar.
> With Fastmail or another provider, you're trusting another corp.
You're trusting another corp that only handles your email. Not your photos, videos, notes, phones, thermostats, doorbells(?), security cameras, speakers, TVs, youtube income/career...
China has a state issued social credit score. We have a social credit score via megacorps.
I'm not sure that drawing a parallel here is actually helping the discussion.
Anyhow yeah: megacorps control is dangerous and frustrating. Unfortunately, splitting all services across several different providers is something that requires lots of conscious effort from all users. And even after you split out everything that you use, you might suddenly realize that there is now a new service provided by one of these megacorps, which you started to use without realizing that it's linked to your main account.
The email address itself is what's irreplaceable for me because it's tied into my identity at this point.
The other soft stuff is fairly trivially backed up and not locked in to any vendor. The devices would need to be replaced, which would be annoying mainly due to cost but would have no long term impact beyond that.
I get your point, but losing my email address would be orders of magnitude more painful for me than those other things.
All of the other options have drawbacks too. With Fastmail or another provider, you're trusting another corp. Setting up your own involves a bunch of work and difficult to solve drawbacks like spam filtering. I'm also not sure that it's harder to compromise in the grand scheme of things. There are horror stories of people losing domains too.
I think this is a prime case of out of touch governments failing to keep up with regulations. My email is part of my identity at this point and more valuable than any of the plastic that has been assigned to me by the govt. I can't think of much in my life that would be more painful to lose than that email address. Yet, we are all so powerless...