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Why use mailing lists?

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Re: Why use mailing lists?

#41

Post by eschaton »

micromacrofoot wrote: post #30
adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discourse seems to fit the bill (although I'm not 100% sure about federation)

it seems to have a plugin for federation, but I'm not sure how federation works for forums

It doesn’t, federation makes it not a web forum and its “web forum first” nature makes Discourse fundamentally unsuitable for things like technical work. (As opposed to, say, product support.)

If you want federation, set up a mailing list gatewayed to a usenet group you host on your own NNTP server, and slap a web forum interface on top of that for the whiny children who won’t use anything that isn’t inside a browser.

Re: Why use mailing lists?

#44

Post by cnst »

SoftTalker wrote: post #33
cnst wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But how would anyone know it's Gmail or Apple if the IP address is new? That's exactly my point, that the reputation need is overstated by all those services that claim to solve a known problem that everyone has heard of, but noone has actually experienced, because, guess what, it might not actually exist. I've seen plenty of cases where the emails sent out through Sendgrid et al, end up in the Spam folder, or these…

Sendgrid, Mailchimp, et. al. ends up in the spam folder because most of what they send is spam.

I'm not disputing that assertion, yet it does go against the marketing materials we're all presented by all of these services, as for reasons to not run our own mailservers.

In other words, if all you want to do is run a personal mailserver, or even a corporate one, you'll probably not have to deal with this supposed IP reputation issue, unless the IP addresses you use, have already been added to the blacklists even before you start at it.

Re: Why use mailing lists?

#45

Post by tolerance »

I was over reading that (very well-written) explanation of the AT Protocol: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45388021

And I felt conflicted. Because it sounds great. It makes sense. But I don’t want it and now I’m wondering about what’s appealing about distributing bits of content across platforms.

This is something I can get behind. Fenced gardens.

Re: Why use mailing lists?

#46

Post by SoftTalker »

cnst wrote: post #44
SoftTalker wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sendgrid, Mailchimp, et. al. ends up in the spam folder because most of what they send is spam.

I'm not disputing that assertion, yet it does go against the marketing materials we're all presented by all of these services, as for reasons to not run our own mailservers. In other words, if all you want to do is run a personal mailserver, or even a corporate one, you'll probably not have to deal with this supposed IP reputation issue, unless the IP addresses you use, have already been added to the blacklists even…

Yes if you are using a domain that's been around for a while and has a reasonably stable IP address history and is not on any blacklists, that is the defintion of a "good" reputation. Or at least it's not a bad one.

Re: Why use mailing lists?

#47

Post by charcircuit »

>Despite that, they're still heavily used

This person is in a serious bubble. Mailing lists are not used by billions of people.

>Mailing lists require no special software

Even ignoring that most social media are accessible via a web browser instead of their dedicated app, this is just adding more complexity than having a single app for people to use. Everyday people want a single way to do things.

>Mailing lists are simple

No, you have to figure out how to configure a mail client and how to properly respond to things and is no where as user friendly as typical social media apps.

>They impose minimal security risk

Using an external service lets you outsource security to dedicated security teams as opposed to no security team or a volunteer security guy.

>They impose minimal privacy risk.

I trust the privacy of social media than some mailing list where the admin could secretly grep the contents of it with no over site.

>Mailing lists are bandwidth-friendly

The average internet user is scrolling through tiktok, streaming videos. Bandwidth is not a big deal anymore.

>Mailing lists interoperate.

Social media have features for reposting between different groups. There is also copy and paste and links.

>They're asynchronous

There are social media like facebook which are also asynchronous.

>They work reasonably well even in the presence of multiple outages and severe congestion

Social media is also resistant to outages and have dedicated teams towards keeping it online.

>They're push, not pull, so new content just shows up.

Have you not been on social media for decades? Pushing content to the user is the norm.

>They scale beautifully.

Social media scales to billions of people using them.

>they're relatively free of abuse vectors.

You can't pretend that spam does not exist.

Mailing lists are not mainstream and they never will be. That way of operating did not resonate with people at the scale that is needed to reach even tens of millions of people. Social media works. Chat apps work. Forums can work.

Re: Why use mailing lists?

#48

Post by zaptheimpaler »

I hate mailing lists, even if I recognize some of their benefits. A forum like Discourse is infinitely better in usability - to view, browse, search, follow specific threads or forums and mute the rest, do DMs, do real nested replies, embed rich media and code with proper formatting and just have a nice interface to work with. It looks like they even support ActivityPub federation recently. Although its GPL not MIT. I'm sure someone will come and tell me how all of this is doable with some janky interface or hacks on mailing lists. It's just unfortunate we have to choose. The people on mailing lists often argue vigorously for them, the rest of us are on discord/slack and have no idea they even exist and are repulsed by the usability problems. You can't convince me pasting diffs in an email thread is on par with Github/Gitlab code reviews with no downsides whatsoever.

Re: Why use mailing lists?

#49

Post by [deleted] »

thewebguyd wrote: post #21
teddyh wrote: post #2

Like I recently wrote in response to someone here who was fascinated that mailing lists were “still a thing in 2025”: Please, inform us of an alternative which is: • Non-proprietary • Federated • Archivable • Accessible • Not dependent on a specific company — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43972038 >

And those are the exact same reasons I loath the trend of discourse moving into discord groups, or slack groups, hell I've even seen Facebook groups. None of those are reachable without an account and in many cases an invite (private by default), they are not indexed by search engines, they are proprietary, cannot be exported or archived, etc. It's asking for knowledge to be lost.

[deleted]

Re: Why use mailing lists?

#50

Post by imiric »

The value of the federated/decentralized nature of email is hard to overstate.

So many of the problems of modern technology are caused by centralization. It concentrates power and wealth into a handful of companies that now control the internet. It introduces extraordinary problems from managing data and services at global scales, which is the biggest technical challenge these companies face. It makes government surveillance easier (PRISM, etc.), and is a prime target of corruption by advertising, propaganda, etc. It robs people of control over their data.

All of these things are either non-issues, or far less of an issue, with decentralized technology invented half a century ago. It is bewildering that we had email, Usenet, DNS, and the internet itself, yet we ended up with strong centralization with the web, which is built on decentralized protocols.

I partly blame the early implementation of the WWW for this. I've written at length about this before[1][2], so I won't repeat it here.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43296810

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44327508

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