In the early web days there was a service where you email an URL to a certain email address and it responded with an email with the webpage attached.
We need that back. We need it to escape arbitrary anti-Tor anti-VPN forms of enshitification.
archive.org is very useful but we cannot rely on it.
Email has also become enshitified and it’s rightfully distrusted and even abandoned by the few true resisters who exist. So ideally it would be an onion email address that takes in the requests. Perhaps an onion activitypub UI as well.
This is a similar SMS-based service - dunno if it’s of interest to you since it’s obviously not privacy-preserving, but I thought I’d share just in case. I tried & failed to use it once, but I admittedly didn’t try very hard to figure it out.
I don’t think that solves the problem of getting a website’s context.
But nonetheless it looks like a very useful tool for me because I sometimes get 1000+ free SMS msgs and at times have no Internet connection. I’ll have to study it more to see how SMS msgs get relayed and to where. Glad you mentioned it!
It also inspires another idea. I will not email a Gmail or MS user because they can use my email to reply and include info I would not want Google or MS to have. But if I could somehow use SMS to reach a gmail recipient in a way that they cannot reply via gmail, it would be interesting because I could then control what Google/MS are allowed to see.
I think the issue here is that someone has to pay to run that, and while I don’t want to discount your use case, I think this is already solved in a variety of (cheaper) ways.
Would you pay for a service like this, and if so, how much?
If the tool were combined with this web audit tool, so I get back an attachment reflecting the website from an in-country residential IP, and diffs for the same site from other kinds of IPs from other regions, along with an audit report, I might pay ⅛ of a Big Mac per transaction.
Note that the OONI project might have an interest in this so perhaps they would fund some of it.
That makes sense. I just don’t think the economics work for anyone to spend time developing this. It would take work to get to the point where it’s functional (which is potentially quite expensive). Beyond that, a domain name is $10-$15 a year and hosting would be $5-$7 a month. For $0.65 per request, it’s just not worth it.
I’d need a little over a hundred requests a year to break even on just mandatory external costs (development costs are harder to estimate and would almost certainly be 10x, 20x or more of the other costs).
It would be trivial to ddos, and likewise for the receiving mail server. Sounds like an amplification attack by design.
