Running a server is very doable. There are packages to deploy and configure almost everything for you and removing a ton of headache.

Getting your email recognized as not spam by the major providers is pretty much impossible. You need all sorts of stuff to help verify integrity including special DNS records and public identity keys, but even if you do everything right, your mail can very easily get black holed before it even reaches a user’s inbox because of stupid shit like someone abused your rented server’s IP years ago, and you can’t seem to get it off everyone’s lists.

Email as a decentralized tool has effectively been ruined by spam and anti-spam measures. You’re effectively forced to use a provider because it’s near impossible to make your outgoing mail work as an individual. I think some of those anti-spam measures are anticompetitive, but I do think some are just desperate attempts to reduce the massive flow of spam.

Aw poor corporate behemoth doesn’t want to spend the pennies (compared to profits) to do things right. If we’re being fair, fuck them for cheaping out at our expense.

Yeah, the core plot idea was pretty much the same, but the way it played out was pretty different. The whole thing stays way more low key, and I wanna say the whole jail thing never happened. It’s been a long time since I read either version, so I’m fuzzy on the details, but it definitely got a significant rework for publication.

I’ve tried to find a copy of the original before, and I think I found a poorly cloned website with the original links a few years ago, not updated to point at the new clone so I had to tweak it every time to continue. I’d love to get it converted to an ebook so I could archive it, but I haven’t tried in years now.

Tangentially, John Dies at the End is fucking great, easily one of my top book series. Kinda prefer the original online version of the sequel, but that’s hard to find these days, and the print version is still good. The movie’s pretty good, although it’s a shame they cut so much. I get why, movies can only be so long, but would have been cool to see all the stories from the book get told.