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Why use mailing lists?

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Re: Why use mailing lists?

#151

Post by Erwyn »

palata wrote: post #147
Erwyn wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about receiving. Receiving is the easy part. It is about the delivery of your own mail. > you stop giving money to your mail host and get a different one. I was entertaining the "host your own mail server" thought, I agree that if you don't host it yourself then you can change your provider if it fails you.

> if you don't host it yourself then you can change your provider if it fails you. Even if you host it yourself :-). The key is to own your domain.

If I recall the domain is not the only issue, IP is also deeply involved or am I wrong?

Re: Why use mailing lists?

#152

Post by lmm »

mcdow wrote: post #74
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?

It hasn't been done, because it's impossible. You might get the first 80%, maybe even the first 90% if you had enough money to hire top designers for several years, but you'll never reach Slack level polish.

Re: Why use mailing lists?

#153

Post by bombcar »

abnercoimbre wrote: post #56
thewebguyd wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

The distinction between chat and email and forums was helpful mentally to compartmentalize - you’d expect people to act differently (forums even have things they call “chat” threads that are more like chat).

The problem the “bubble up to Wiki” is that you need a specific subset of people with the technical know-how to understand the issue and solutions AND the time and desire to update the Wiki.

One thing that can help is being absolutely a tyrant and insisting that discussions about bugs, etc happen on a bug tracker- or at least the resolutions go there.

Re: Why use mailing lists?

#154

Post by pabs3 »

arp242 wrote: post #112
pabs3 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are tools to import mails into whichever email client you prefer, especially if the list is archived on a public-inbox instance, which is the best mailing list archiving system so far. https://lwn.net/Articles/875239/ https://blog.gnoack.org/post/lei/ https://people.kernel.org/monsieuricon/lore-lei-part-1-getti... https://b4.docs.kernel.org/ https://github.com/mikwielgus/forum-dl

You can't seriously claim that this is good UX. And that's what this is about: not that it's impossible but that the UX is not good, especially for the casual user only interested in the occasional thread.

It depends on your client, if you have one with bad UX, then get a better one.

Re: Why use mailing lists?

#155

Post by pwdisswordfishz »

throw7 wrote: post #34
thewebguyd wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, I was hoping to check out ladybird browser project, but they use discord.

There are other problems besides access. The big one being that the people that you'll find on Discord are the kinds of people that you'll find on Discord.

Re: Why use mailing lists?

#157

Post by imcritic »

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 >

First inform us of mail providers that match the same criteria.

Re: Why use mailing lists?

#158

Post by randunel »

imcritic wrote: post #157
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 >

First inform us of mail providers that match the same criteria.

All, as far as I can tell.

Re: Why use mailing lists?

#159

Post by notepad0x90 »

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 >

Forums are fine.

You understand I'm sure that federated is not the same as decentralized. Mailing lists are moderated, the list is hosted on a specific domain and that domain's owner can do whatever they want with the list. How is that different from a forum or some website? I don't like them but there mastodon,matrix,etc.. all open source and you can host them on a domain like you can a mailing list. They meet all your criteria.

I have an additional criteria to add: Security! I would like to authenticate that someone really said what is on the mailing list or its archives.

But before that, mailing lists are not as accessible as all the other options, because it all comes down to how accessible the email client is. Gmail is wildly different from mutt. Inconsistently accessible is what it is.

how about privacy? I wouldn't want my email and my email's domain published to the world to communicate with the list. And again with integrity, mailing list moderators can do all sorts of stuff (and I've seen plenty of shady and downright questionable practices).

How about we let things built for different times and with different requirements than what we have to day go to sleep quietly?

Re: Why use mailing lists?

#160

Post by whartung »

notepad0x90 wrote: post #159
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 >

Forums are fine. You understand I'm sure that federated is not the same as decentralized. Mailing lists are moderated, the list is hosted on a specific domain and that domain's owner can do whatever they want with the list. How is that different from a forum or some website? I don't like them but there mastodon,matrix,etc.. all open source and you can host them on a domain like you can a mailing list. They meet all y…

Mailing list delivery is centralized, but archiving is federated. How many folks have a full copy of, say, the last 1, 2, 5, 10 years of a long running mailing list?

Client accessibility is up to the individual user. They can choose whatever client fits them best.

I don’t know any mailing list software that signs messages as a sort of “yes, this message did travel through the mailing list” verification. Were it that important I’m sure it’s possible. But having identical messages on 1000 subscribers computers has to stand for something.

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