One of the email providers I highlighted in the Degoogling post was Skiff. Skiff is no longer alive. It was abruptly shut down in a day1 without notice, even to the patrons of their Discord community, in which I was a member. Skiff was acquired by Notion2.
Like many, I was fond of Skiff at the time. However, it is unfair for readers to stumble across my post and feel I supported their shutdown. It is not about shaming the Skiff team but about the need for transparency and fairness in such situations.
The team that built Skiff from the ground up had the right to sell it at any time. They even gave about a year for users to migrate and reportedly returned payments to paid customers. However, the way they handled the shutdown was less than ideal.
Skiff did not share the news gracefully about their buyout and shutdown of services. As far as a community member’s experience, the first thing that happened was they shut down their Discord community server. It is a tactic not to entertain any questions regarding the buyout. Skiff made a public announcement while the members were clobbering on other social media like Reddit about losing access to the Discord server.
Companies come and go. I don’t see it as the case with Skiff. They decided to sell and let their customers in the streets3 because many Discord community members were migrating their personal and business email/calendar/domain to Skiff.
Despite Skiff’s closure, the Degoogling post remains as relevant as ever. Privacy-respecting technology is not a luxury but a right of every user.
I’ve updated it to reflect the situation with Skiff.
The core issue here is trust. How do we trust in new companies and their services? While Gmail and other such services do not respect user privacy, they prevail because they are not going away anytime soon.
