Imagine a communication protocol mainly controlled by the GAFAM , with security so weak it can’t even protect message content, and features barely adequate for the 1980s.

Now picture this protocol being used by 4.48 billion people and in nearly every business.⁰

Once a technology is deeply entrenched, it’s hard to abandon, no matter how absurdly obsolete it becomes. This is email’s story. We’re all holding out for the moment we can finally abandon this outdated technology.

The time has come to fundamentally understand this technology in order to find a way to replace it.

Why is email outdated ?

Decentralized in theory, centralized in practice

Email was built to be decentralized: no central authority, just independent servers exchanging messages. But in reality, setting up your own mail server requires serious resources, money, time, and technical know-how. Worse, modern anti-spam filters make it almost impossible for self-hosted servers to avoid being blacklisted. ¹

This is why most people rely on free email providers like Google’s Gmail or Microsoft’s Outlook.

This monopoly of large platforms over our emails is a problem. Notably for our privacy : despite all their promises, email service providers have the technical ability to read all our emails. It’s also a problem of dependence on these platforms, making it increasingly difficult to create independent email services. ²

We can say it with certainty: email’s original decentralized vision is long dead.

Poor security, very poor privacy

By default, emails are not encrypted. This fact is rather alarming. It means all our emails are easily accessible to governments and corporations, which together pose a massive threat to our privacy.³

When you send an email to a recipient, you’re not just sending it to them, you’re sharing it with numerous untrusted actors who can store and analyze both the content and all associated metadata before it even reaches its destination.⁴

One solution is to use end-to-end encryption for emails, as offered by certain services. However, this approach is highly limited because it requires the recipient to also have encryption enabled, which is rarely the case.

Even if everyone agreed to encrypt email content, two major privacy issues would persist:

As we can sadly observe, with emails, data security and information confidentiality are not guaranteed at all. Moreover, protection against attacks is also not guaranteed. Security issues go beyond human vulnerabilities, such as viruses in attachments or social engineering attacks like phishing and extend to fundamental flaws in email protocols themselves, such as email spoofing⁵ or the lack of authentication security⁶ .

Lack of important features

Although this may not be as critical as the previous issues, it is essential for a modern messaging protocol to include certain key features. Email relies on protocols that all date back to the 1980s and have barely evolved since then⁷ ⁸ ⁹. This profound lack of modernity is very noticeable.

Email’s Replacement

It is clear that the question is no longer whether email as we know it will be replaced by another technology, but rather when, by what, and how.

However, there is another question we must answer first : Why do we still use emails ?

I certainly haven’t told you anything new by saying emails are obsolete, yet we all continue to use them on a massive scale. Is it simply because replacing such a widely adopted technology is difficult? In my view, if emails remain so deeply ingrained, it’s because there is still no credible alternative to date.

Of course, over the past few years, we’ve developed a vast array of messaging systems, more instant, secure, confidential, user-friendly, and feature-rich than ever. However, it would be a misunderstanding of how we use email to think that current messaging platforms like WhatsApp, Signal, or MS Teams (hell no!) could ever truly compete with it. Even though, for the most part, these solutions outperform email in many ways.

Email replaced part of traditional mail, while WhatsApp-like instant messaging apps have partly replaced oral communication. These two technologies are fundamentally different and cannot be interchangeable.

These differences lie primarily in the user interfaces implemented by clients :

| Feature | Instant messaging apps | Email |
| ------------------- | -------------------------- | -------------------------- |
| Message Format | Short, informal, chat-like | Long, formal, structured |
| Integration | Limited APIs, bots | Extensive |
| User Identity | Phone number/email | Domain-based email address |
| Offline Access | Limited | Full offline access |
| Message Editing | Edit/delete sent messages | No editing after sending |

All these differences make email far more suitable for formal messages, such as in a professional setting.

Based on the elements above, here’s what a credible alternative to email would notably need to be :

Designed for formal messages

This is certainly what defines a true alternative to email and not just another messaging app. A design tailored for formal and long messages notably includes:

A dedicated field for the recipient’s address

The ability to define a subject line

A text field for the content that occupies a large part of the screen

Formatting options (bold, lists, fonts, etc.)

The ability to add a predefined signature block

Effectively combat security vulnerabilities

End-to-end encryption (E2EE) by default

Minimize metadata exposure in messages

Protection against trackers ¹¹

Publicly verifiable, open-source

• No dependency on a single actor (see below)

(Fully) Decentralized

A communication method this important must not depend on a single provider that could control, monitor, or censor our messages. Current email protocols are already designed to be decentralized, but as we’ve observed, this decentralization is barely effective.

The successor to email must be truly decentralized. That means it must not simply rely on a few providers, as is currently the case. The current model of dependence on mail servers, which are difficult to set up and costly, is not suitable for a genuinely distributed network. In our future communication network, clients must either be direct nodes in the network or rely on a multitude of relays.

Decentralization must in no way compromise message security. Asymmetric cryptography must be implemented so that even a malicious actor within the network has no privileged access to messages or the metadata associated with them, such as the very existence of the message.

Nostr as an alternative to email

With significant development, Nostr could exhibit the necessary features to offer a credible alternative to email.

If you don't yet know what nostr is, I invite you to discover this technology, for example with this excellent explanation: nostr.how

The key point for an email alternative is to preserve the formal message structure. A new Nostr client would need to be developed with a design similar to current email clients. The interface should allow users to write a subject and a long-form message. Most importantly, this new application must be easy to use and accessible to all types of users, without requiring any prior knowledge of Nostr.

Nostr can already be used to send private messages, for example, by leveraging NIP-17, which enables encrypted messaging with minimal metadata exposure. Secure messaging implementations built on Nostr, such as White Noise , demonstrate that it is entirely possible to create a messaging system with very high security standards using this protocol.

As for identification using a domain name, this functionality was added with NIP-05 , which allows users to have an identifier similar to an email address, such as <<>>. The domain provider must authorize the user to identify themselves with it but holds no additional control over the user or their messages.

NIP-17 already supports sending messages to multiple recipients simultaneously, adding a message subject, and managing replies. It thus provides a secure and suitable solution without requiring the implementation of a new NIP specific to our project.

A new Nostr client for email is one of several potential solutions that could help protect privacy while improving the experience for 56% of the global population ¹². I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to consider replacing outdated email protocols as one of the greatest digital challenges of our time.

As with so many problems, Nostr could be the solution. ¹³

I told him that, in exchange, I’d like him to buy me a domain name. And that’s how I got the FutureOfThe.World domain.

I already had the domain futureofthe.tech, which I use as my presentation site for my projects and blogs. It's to adopt a more global vision that I chose the domain FutureOfThe.World.

I had the domain, but I didn’t really know what to do with it.
What can you even put on a website that’s supposed to predict the future of the world?

Our World

To imagine the future of the world, you first have to understand what the world is like today. And that’s not so easy.

The world is big.

You probably already knew that. But can you really imagine just how big?
No, you can't.

You know the world is big — or maybe even very big — but it’s impossible to truly grasp its actual size.

The earth measures 510.1 million km². It's a huge number and very difficult to imagine. But when I say the world is big, I'm not just talking about its surface area.These 510.1 million km² are home to around 8 million people: 8 million ideas, 8 million lives, 8 million dreams, 8 million humans. Not just humans, but hundreds of billions of other living beings, each with their own roles in the natural ecosystem.

So yes. The world is big.

The World is beautiful.

Our big world is beautiful. From human constructions to natural landscapes, our world is beautiful.

It is not only visually beautiful but also in every other sense of the term. Human civilization is something magnificent, which we have spent thousands of years building. Certainly, the world is filled with war, misery, and many other horrible situations. But not only that. There are also beautiful projects, successes, and goodwill in the world. This is what makes the world beautiful, what it has to offer us, and what humanity bring to it.

FutureOfThe.World

Perhaps I was too ambitious in choosing to create a site on the future of the world. Because the reality is that I can't predict the future. I can't because the world is a big place and I can't predict the behavior of 8 billion people.

But in this case... What to do with this site? What's the point of a site called FutureOfTheWorld if it can't even tell you the future of the world ?

The best I can do is take the current data and analyze what might happen in the future if that data follows its current trajectory.

If we, the humans of Earth, do not change our way of life, and if scientific estimates are confirmed, then the Earth, or at least a large part of it, will no longer be viable. And it's not just the future, it's already happening. Extreme weather events multiply, parts of the Earth become uninhabitable, and lives are lost. This is just the beginning. It's not just about a hot summer, but also about people dying.

So is this the purpose of FutureOfThe.World? To explain how thousands of years of development of our human civilization are being destroyed in less than a century? And how are we all going to pay the price for our stupidity ?

• No.

Knowing the problem is only the first step. Now it's time to find solutions. There are plenty of political theories on how to stop global warming. Unfortunately, it's very difficult to say what the best thing is for our governments to do.

That's why I won't be talking about political solutions on FutureOfThe.World. It's actually not that complicated. If a large part of the global population agrees to take some actions, it will be enough to sustainably limit the unfolding catastrophe. That's why I chose to include on FutureOfThe.World a list of individual actions that you yourself can take.

You may think it's useless, because part of the population won't make the effort, and because you alone won't have any impact. But that's not true.
Firstly, because if everyone looks at people worse than us, no one will change. Secondly, even you alone have an impact; your actions help to slightly reduce the crisis, which will already save a small part of the world. And if you are someone who makes an effort in this challenge, it will motivate your friends to do the same, who in turn will motivate their friends, ultimately establishing a new way of life on a large scale.

Can my Website Save the WORLD ?

The answer is no. My site isn't going to save the world. Because it's not my site that over-consumes, pollutes and emits greenhouse gases. It's us. My site can't save the world, but it can tell you that it's still possible.

I started web development at a very young age, and creating a personal website has always been a rewarding activity. Before arriving at this version, I regularly created multiple iterations of my site, each with a different interface. At first, I was afraid of CSS, so I started by building simple sites with just text and images. Today, I've returned to that simplicity—but for different reasons. I've archived some of my site versions since 2023, which I'd like to show you.

My site that you should talk to

In 2023 (I was 14), I created a site with the goal of rethinking user interfaces in a completely different way. On this site, you can talk to a script that answers you in a way that's somewhat similar to how I would. It's not an AI, but a list of questions and answers. When you ask something, the script finds the most similar question in its list and responds accordingly—sometimes with a bit of humor.

It wasn't really a good interface, as the information wasn't easy to find, and often my script didn’t have an answer.\
But I still find the idea very interesting. The goal of the site wasn’t to directly display content to the visitor, but to let them ask the robot for what they wanted.

In a way, the concept was a bit visionary. With the rise of language models, it’s now common to see conversational agents we can interact with on websites.

These chatbots often use the OpenAI API, with an initial prompt that includes the page content and other site information.\
For now, these chatbots are just another feature of traditional websites. But who knows? Maybe in the near future, websites will stop presenting content directly. Instead, we’ll ask the chatbot questions to find what we’re looking for.

*We won't be visiting sites—we’ll be talking to them.

My site with no purpose

In 2023, I created the strangest version of my personal website. It displayed my logo with social links and cycled through random programming jokes or sentences every few seconds.\
What’s strange is that when you scroll, there’s no new content. Instead, a spinning tourbillon appears in the background, a screaming audio track plays, and the page stretches for endless scrolling.

\

You might ask what the purpose of this strange idea was. I could say it was an artistic project, or that it was fun.\
But no. It was none of that. I built the site simply because I had nothing else to do. I had just started learning web development and was amazed by the infinite creative possibilities. I didn’t make the site for money, or for school, or even to share anything with the world.

For me, the purpose of a website wasn’t to display content with a polished design and specific goal.\
For me, a site was just a way to experiment, explore, and learn.

A more professional website

By the end of 2023, I had improved a lot in web development and wanted to use my new skills to improve my site. So I made a new version. Compared to the previous ones, this one was much better. It wasn’t just an experiment—it was a real presentation website with content and an organized design.

\

This version was simple but pretty.

My websites that wanted to be more than just websites

In 2024 and 2025, I created several versions of my site. I wanted them to be more impressive, with more animated elements. I wanted to wow visitors with beauty and interactivity.

\ \

futureofthe.tech/history/v4\
futureofthe.tech/history/v5\
futureofthe.tech/history/v6

The goal of those sites wasn’t just to display content but to offer a visual experience. In my mind, the result was incredible. But I forgot something: I’m not a web designer, and good design is hard. So these sites weren’t that great.

My determination to make something impressive made the site less readable, less organized, and ultimately—not that good.

My site that wasn’t mine

In 2025, I accepted the truth: I’m not a good web designer. And honestly, I don’t enjoy it. But I still wanted a good-looking site, and I had a solution: I created the HTML content and asked the AI "Claude" to generate the CSS design.

\

The result looked good, the design was pretty. But... there were two problems. First, I didn’t like it: yes, it was pretty, but it wasn’t my site. I hadn’t made it—it didn’t reflect me.\
Second, after visiting several AI-generated websites, I noticed how similar they all looked. AIs are good at creating design, but they lack one key quality of a designer: creativity. If websites are all designed by AIs in the future, there will be no originality. That would be a shame.

What is the purpose of a website?

In January 1991, the first public web servers were turned on. On August 6, 1991, Tim Berners-Lee published a short summary of the World Wide Web project. Let’s take a look at the page.

\

The page is just black text on a white background with blue links. It’s not pretty or impressive. But was that the goal? Was Berners-Lee trying to build an impressive page full of animations and interactive elements?

No, it wasn’t. For one, CSS didn’t exist. But more importantly, that wasn’t the point. The sole purpose of that page was to introduce the World Wide Web. And it succeeded. It’s organized, readable, and the whole site weighs only 2.17 KB.

Would it really be better if the site had a modern design?\
I asked Claude to generate a modern CSS design for the page. Here’s the result:

\

Yeah! The design is much better!\
But now the page weighs 57 KB. And... sure, it’s prettier. But the information isn’t any easier to find, and the structure isn’t improved.

The original page gets straight to the point. With the modern AI design, the page looks good—but doesn’t help you understand the content better.

Before I was born, the purpose of a website was to share information.\
But what about now?

Why my website isn't beautiful, and why I don't care

\> ⚠️⚠️ > This section is outdated. My site is now powered by Zola.

This site isn’t pretty or impressive. There’s no elaborate design or animations. It’s just white text on a black background. By modern standards, this isn’t attractive.\
But when I created it, I thought about its purpose—its reason to exist online. And here’s my conclusion: I created this site to share ideas, information, and my view of the world. Not to impress people with design.

Keeping the design simple is the best way to focus on what matters: the content and purpose.

Design ≠ Credibility

Very often, the flashiest sites have little substance and no clear purpose. Some of the most beautiful sites I’ve seen are from blockchain or AI projects. But that doesn’t mean they’re credible—often, they’re not.

Take the most serious blockchain project: Bitcoin. Its "official" website is bitcoin.org.

The design is basic, but the content is readable and right there on the homepage.

Now compare that to a less serious blockchain project. Here’s the archived site for Terra, a blockchain protocol that suddenly collapsed in 2022:

\

I encourage you to visit the archive. The design is stunning.\
But flashy design is often used to hide the lack of real content.

Think about the most content-rich site on the Internet: Wikipedia. It’s literally just black text on a white background.

Wikipedia wouldn’t be better with flashy design. Because content is what really matters.

Conclusion

We've explored many ways to present a website. No one knows what tomorrow’s sites design will be. But one thing’s clear: I’ve found what suits me.\
A simple design is ultimately the best way for me to share my ideas.\
And since you're reading this now, it's a success.

Introduction

How did it all begin ?

What was the problem ?

⚠️⚠️ This section differs from the rest of the article, as it includes not only factual information but also my personal vision and interpretation of the situation. Naturally, my opinion is solely my own.

To create this site, we started from a simple observation: some teachers are sometimes totally or partially incompetent in their work and very few measures are taken. The real problem is that teachers are poorly supervised, and students are practically powerless to do anything about it.

Unlike most services, teaching isn’t directly controlled or chosen by the customer — and that’s a major problem.

Imagine two people each opening a bakery in a village. One of them is passionate about her work and puts a lot of time into making great bread. The other lacks motivation and, unfortunately, the skills to make good bread.

Thankfully, both bakers won’t meet the same success because customers can choose which bakery to go to. Services like Google Maps make that decision even easier by offering ratings and reviews.

On the other hand, teaching works very differently. Some teachers are very unskilled and sometimes behave very inappropriately. Others are much more competent and pleasant for the students. But both will continue to teach, while sometimes degrading the quality of teaching and the well-being of the students.

The problem is that students don't have the opportunity to speak out and denounce inappropriate attitudes.

So we built what is essentially Google Maps for teachers — a place where students could rate and comment teachers, just like with businesses.

Our solution: a website where students can rate and review their teachers

Some teachers are represented by an image, which we have retrieved from public sources on the Internet.

We chose three rating criteria that we believe are important :

• humor


• teaching quality


• kindness

Students can rate their teachers on each of these criteria using a scale from 1 to 10. The number of stars is then calculated based on the average score for each criterion.

It is also possible to send comments anonymously.

Our aim was to improve the quality of education by giving students a platform to share their opinions about teachers and report issues, helping encourage teachers to improve.

We wanted to give students the voice they deserved and desperately needed.

Of course, we knew there could be abuse, and we wanted to avoid it at all costs. That's why we started by writing very clear rules :

Not only have we written the rules, we've also set up an effective moderation system to enforce them. This moderation system allows us to block certain IP addresses for a certain period of time.

Day 1

The site was ready. Now, we just had to let people know about it. To do this, we sent an automatic e-mail to a large proportion of the students at our school.

It was a Wednesday like many others, but not for me. That was the day the world would discover our project. We didn't know what to expect, but I could never have imagined what would happen next. It's the kind of day I'll remember for a very long time.

~ 8 a.m. :

Nothing special is happening, but I’m really excited by the idea that people might be discovering our creation.

~ 9h30 a.m. :

I'm in French class when my phone vibrates. I look at it discreetly under the table and notice that one of my friends has sent me a message. He tells me he’s heard about a site for rating teachers and asks if I’m the one who made it.

At that moment, I was both excited and surprised. Excited because it was one of the first times one of my projects had actually made a noise, and it was like a dream for me. But also surprised that he could guess that I was one of the people behind this site. I didn't reply because I didn't know what to say, but I couldn't forget.

~ 10h a.m. :

It's break time. I pull out my phone and go straight to the site to check if there is any activity. There was activity. A lot of it. Even more than we could have imagined. Some had heard about our site through our email, and many had shared it again and again. There were lots of votes, lots of comments.

It was amazing to read the comments in live. It was really exciting. My first satisfaction was that the majority of comments were positive, and none were insulting or unkind.

~ 11h a.m.

At this hour, I was in an art class. It's a class where a lot of people are on their phones. Listening to the people around me, I've heard several people talking about our site. It was really disturbing and stressful because some people asked me if I was the one behind it. I never imagined it would spread so far.

I keep watching the evolution of comments and ratings. All comments are always kind.

~ 1h p.m.

I've already finished school for the day. Like every day, I head to the station to catch the train, my mind going over everything again.

I see one of my friends, and I go up to him to tell him everything that has just happened. I don’t have time to tell him about the situation, he cuts me off to talk about something serious. He explains how the school director came to find him in his classroom.

This friend had not been involved in the development of the site.
Still, the school director was convinced he was behind the site, just because he had some tech skills and a site in the same domain. My friend explained several times that it wasn't him, but he didn't believe it.

The director insisted that he send him excerpts from our Signal discussion. Which I think is illegal, since I didn't agree to this sharing of our private discussions. The problem was that we'd been unmasked: the director now knew we were behind the site.

The end

Recent events have brought me a mix of excitement and stress. I find it very hard to think about anything else. We were in no way prepared for this. We made the difficult decision to take the site down. Because of the pressure, because of the stress and because we never wished for any trouble. We had created the site to improve the situation based on our vision, but we took it down because it had become too much responsibility.

The site will never come back online.

My most talked-about project was only online for a day. In one day 52 students voted more than 300 times, and sent more than 30 comments. No one knows how far it could have gone if it had stayed online.

We mistakenly thought that shutting down the site would prevent reprisals from the school authorities. We were completely unprepared for what happened next...

There was no hate

There’s one more point I’d like to emphasize, because it’s a very important one. Even with total anonymity, not a single one of the numerous comments about the teachers was hateful or insulting. The moderation system hasn't even been used. Most of the comments were constructive, or even friendly.

This project shows that giving students an anonymous voice doesn’t lead to hate, it leads to honesty. This honesty is the key to a better school system.

Example of authentic comments :

For your information: GOAT means “Greatest Of All Time”.

English translation (google translate)

Teachers' opinions

Favorable to the idea

One of my teachers even confessed to having written a positive comment about a colleague.

Very angry

News article full of misinformation

This was just a few days after the site’s launch. Someone sent me a link to an article in the regional newspaper. I was totally unprepared for what I was about to read.

I quickly realized it was an article about our teacher rating site. A lot of things came to mind when I realized this. Already, what the fuck?? How is it possible to have an article on our site? How did the information spread so far?

I'd always really hoped that one day one of my projects would be the subject of an article in the newspaper, but it really wasn't the way I'd imagined it.

I was very surprised, but as I read the article, I felt not just surprise, but also indignation.
I had many reasons to feel indignant, and I’ll list some of them here :

---
Here's the title of the article (translated from French with Deepl) :

Insults on the Internet also have consequences

Insults ? What insult ? As I explained earlier, the site has never contained ANY insults of any kind.

Here's the subtitle of the article (translated from French with Deepl) :

A website is causing trouble at *. Students have insulted their teachers online. An act that is not without consequences. The school management and the Department of Compulsory Education want to send out a message of responsibility.

The site has since been closed by the host, at the request of management. The three young people have written an apology and will be heard once again by the management, who do not wish to take sanctions immediately. but rather to learn from the experience.

The three young people who created this website are exposed to sanctions. Firstly, at administrative and school level. But for the moment, the director of **** has told us that it is still too early to discuss this. Secondly, potential legal sanctions could be applied, since this complaint is currently directed against the website and its authors, and concerns a potential violation of personality.

So it's too early for sanctions, but not too early for legal action and leaking false information to the press ?

After discovering the article, we sent several emails to the newspaper, which replied, briefly, that the article was mainly for educational purposes and that it did not reveal our identities.

Does an educational purpose justify sharing false information ?

Meeting with the school management

To begin with, we were asked if the police had already contacted us. And this wasn't the case. So it looks more like an attempt at intimidation than a real question, since we still haven't been contacted. Even today, we have no proof that a real legal complaint was ever filed.

During those two hours, we had a hard time expressing ourselves, as we were constantly interrupted and put under pressure.

The school management used screenshots of our Signal group as an argument, which posed two problems.

• I never gave my consent for him to read our messages. So I think it's illegal.


• Many of the messages were meant to be humorous, and they don't mean a thing without the necessary context.

They replied, and I quote (literal translation of my memories).

Until now we have been nice, but if you want to play mean, then we can show our fangs.

In my opinion, this sounds like a threat.

Sanctions :

• Three free days of work for the school during the vacations.
• Ban from attending the end-of-year prom.

The reason given for banning us from the end-of-year prom was that some teachers might try to confront us. Which makes no sense, since many teachers actually supported the site — and in any case, it’s their responsibility to control themselves, not ours to avoid them. But anyway I don't care since the prom looked really boring.

Conclusion

This article primarily presents the factual sequence of events, but it is true that we also made mistakes. If we were to do it again, we would likely do things differently.

This project was, above all, an instructive experience from which we draw lessons and learning. We learned how to create a dynamic website and a database, but also that a project can easily spiral out of control, that news articles sometimes present highly exaggerated or false information, and that ethics and responsibility should always guide our actions.