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Why use mailing lists?

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Re: Why use mailing lists?

#71

Post by magicalhippo »

mrweasel wrote: post #11
magicalhippo wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Newsgroups as in NNTP[1] fits those criteria, no? Granted, federated bit is more tricky now. Back in the days many if not most ISPs ran a NNTP server. But the protocol supports it. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_News_Transfer_Protocol

I loved Usenet back in the day, but I sort of wonder why organisations keep their servers running. I struggle to find any active newsgroups these days. Weirdly enough spam still hits some of the groups.

Yeah it died off sadly. Had so many good news discussions back then. Still miss the buzz of downloading a new batch of messages.

I used Gmane[1] to access mailing lists as newsgroups, which I've always thought was a much better fit.

Alas as with all good things that was shut down also.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gmane

Re: Why use mailing lists?

#72

Post by philip1209 »

I was trying to make a modern version of mailing lists with Booklet [1] - it just never got traction. I intend to open-source it soon. [2]

Async communications are underrated.

[1]: https://booklet.group

[2]: I did open-source my other project recently, though - so it's not an entirely hollow intention!

Re: Why use mailing lists?

#74

Post by mcdow »

kajaktum wrote: post #60

All this is true but mailing lists UI sucks. Please tell me how you navigate a tree of messages? It is not easy to tell who is this responding to and who responds to it. Yes, it can be figured out but why does the tree change as I navigate it? [0] [0] https://lkml.org/lkml/2024/1/7/103

I bet it wouldn’t be too hard to build a nice UI over a mailing list. You could make it as nice as Slack. Has this been done?

Re: Why use mailing lists?

#75

Post by [deleted] »

eschaton wrote: post #41
micromacrofoot wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[deleted]

Re: Why use mailing lists?

#76

Post by layer8 »

mxchris2121 wrote: post #3
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 >

Please inform me of an opensource way to run one that I can actually get configured properly.

Besides GNU Mailman, there’s also Sympa [0]. It’s fairly straightforward to set those up on a VPS with Debian or similar if you’re familiar with running a Linux server.

[0] https://www.sympa.community/

Re: Why use mailing lists?

#77

Post by skydhash »

thewebguyd wrote: post #62
abnercoimbre wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm gradually switching our in-person community to Revolt [0] because we want to self-host and own the data. (Discord offers extreme convenience, but it's a black-box for-profit platform.) We don't want casual discourse to be indexed to the public. Instead we'll host a wiki system soon that bubbles up technical chatter into worthy articles. Is that a reasonable compromise? [0] https://revolt.handmadecities.com

It's definitely better than discord in that it solves the data ownership problem. It's not federated, still centralized to your own revolt server - but I think that's OK for private groups anyway, or ephemeral discussions (unless Revolt can be federated, I'm not familiar with it) My concern is more the trend of open groups, even open source projects, centralizing around discord both for dev discussion, community disc…

If I see discord, I just go the other way, or use the code as is.

Re: Why use mailing lists?

#78

Post by layer8 »

throwaway270925 wrote: post #66
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 >

I sometimes wonder why there aren't any chat-based apps/UIs for mailing lists? Think UIs in the style of Discord/Slack/Teams/etc but with email/mailinglist(s) as backend. IIRC there was Delta.chat but no idea how they are doing? (And if they integrate with mailing lists/formatting etc)

Mailing lists are largely a different mode of communication than chat, as alluded to in parts of TFA. I’d go as far as to say that mailing lists are mostly incompatible with chat-like usage patterns. It’s a feature, not a bug. Chat programs and protocols like IRC have existed almost as long as mailing lists, but were never a replacement for them.

Re: Why use mailing lists?

#79

Post by skydhash »

eisa01 wrote: post #52

Mailing lists are horrible for people new to a list, as you have no history to search in your inbox and the UI to browse the archives are beyond atrocious. People that have been on the list for decades tend to forget this, and wonder why it dies down

Wait, what? I regularly use marc-info (for OpenBSD) and emacs-devel, and it’s quite easy to find information. And you can always get the mbox and use something like mairix if you want local tools.

Re: Why use mailing lists?

#80

Post by layer8 »

perching_aix wrote: post #73

The only thing keeping me away from mailing lists is them being built on top of email.

You need a good email client (and email editor) that provides some affordances for mailing lists, for sure. Apart from that, the fact that mailing lists use email provides at least half of their benefits, and of the reasons they endure.
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