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Why use mailing lists?

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Re: Why use mailing lists?

#191

Post by immibis »

rlpb wrote: post #132
maxloh wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe Matrix?

I think Matrix is a good upcoming contender. The available clients are not really mature yet though. Element is excessively heavyweight and bloated, being Electron based. Other clients all seem to miss some essential feature or other. And there's no good archiving solution yet.

And Element are consistently just not working in various ways, different every time. For example, recently I tried to join a room address from another server and was told "can't join that because a server address wasn't specified" but another address on the same server says "room not found" so it clearly did know the server address.

And there's the whole thing where you have to always be signed into at least one device at a time. If there's ever a time when you're not signed into any device, you have to reset your encryption key which means losing access to all old messages plus sending a notification to everyone you're in contact with. And I've had times when the reset button also just didn't work, throwing some error, so I was just locked out.

Re: Why use mailing lists?

#192

Post by setopt »

replwoacause wrote: post #186
pwdisswordfishz wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah I tried to use Discord on two different occasions and each time I hated it. Why do people want to share information someplace that gets lost to the sands of time?

> Why do people want to share information someplace that gets lost to the sands of time?

I mean, it’s the same reasons people used IRC for decades, and some people were unhappy if channels saved and published the IRC logs.

Informal asynchronous communication arguably has its place, and many people are more willing to speak plainly and without overthinking if what they say is not expected to be publically readable for decades.

Even if, of course, in public chat rooms someone could always record and share what is said without your consent, and if most people don’t say confidential things in public chatrooms about technical topics, there’s still something about a mailing list or forum that makes me personally speak less plainly compared to ephemeral channels.

Re: Why use mailing lists?

#193

Post by Erwyn »

immibis wrote: post #171
Erwyn wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

IP address is involved in some receiver's reputation calculation. It's never involved when sending to a domain.

Sure but then your mail gets dropped on the other end: The main issue I had the last time I tried running my own setup for mails was basically getting an email to an outlook or live.microsoft address. My mails were dropped for no reason, effectively not landing in my friends mailboxes and without any error on my side to know that my mail was getting rejected.

This is when I decided to stop trying getting through with this and came back to paying a provider.

Re: Why use mailing lists?

#194

Post by igor47 »

pabs3 wrote: post #110
benley wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mailman 3 is acceptable, imho. It's been a few years since I worked with it, but I was able to design a reliable public instance of it ( https://mailman.haskell.org ) with a few days of effort, including the migration from mailman v2.

Mailman 3 is horrible, which is why some folks have ported Mailman 2 to Python3. https://github.com/jaredmauch/mailman2-python3

Lol this makes sense. I really respect the author of mailman3's dedication, but the architecture of the system is insane. There are 3 services -- the actual mail delivery piece, the admin interface, and the archiver -- all talking over various public and local interface, configuration is a nightmare, logs are all over the place, it takes over your system with scheduled cron jobs, there's some kind of built in console that I can't figure out how to use due to virtualenv issues plus cli commands that cover only some of the necessary functionality. It's gotten better since I run the tool as two docker containers, but still ends up being the most difficult service to administer and I administer quite a few

Re: Why use mailing lists?

#195

Post by ValdikSS »

pabs3 wrote: post #108
zaptheimpaler wrote: post #48

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 hate Discourse because I can't read it with a local email client.

?!

Discourse is a "mailing list with the interface". It allows both replies over email and starting a new topic over email.

Re: Why use mailing lists?

#196

Post by pabs3 »

ValdikSS wrote: post #195
pabs3 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate Discourse because I can't read it with a local email client.

?! Discourse is a "mailing list with the interface". It allows both replies over email and starting a new topic over email.

Discourse is a more like a forum with a lip-service email interface tacked on, similar to GitHub or any of the web-generation tools.

Re: Why use mailing lists?

#198

Post by theshrike79 »

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.

I can live with requiring an account and not being indexed by search engines.

But the fact that Discord itself can't search Discord is beyond stupid. It's just a void of knowledge, people help other people, answer questions

And then they do it again, because search is completely useless.

Re: Why use mailing lists?

#199

Post by theshrike79 »

SoftTalker wrote: post #20
o11c wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Literally any open-source forum or wiki meets all the requirements except possibly "federated" (depending on whether people set up a dump->restore to another machine), but is much more welcoming to ad-hoc contributors who don't want to subscribe to 10,000 emails per day just to get replies to their own posts. If mailing-list users actually used CC properly this would not be a problem, but THAT IS NOT THE REALITY WE L…

My problem with forums is that I am forced to use a web browser and access them through their provided interface. A lot of them, especially the older ones, are seriously hard to use and even worse on mobile. Mailing lists I access with my preferred mail client and environment. Receiving "10,000 emails per day" would only happen on a very active list. In most cases you're talking about a dozen or at worst a few hundre…

https://www.tapatalk.com/introduction is a thing

They use some kind of API to connect to forums and display them on mobile in a semi-unified UI.

There's nothing stopping anyone from creating an application that uses the same APIs and provides the contents in a more fitting format.

Re: Why use mailing lists?

#200

Post by maxloh »

immibis wrote: post #191
rlpb wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Matrix is a good upcoming contender. The available clients are not really mature yet though. Element is excessively heavyweight and bloated, being Electron based. Other clients all seem to miss some essential feature or other. And there's no good archiving solution yet.

And Element are consistently just not working in various ways, different every time. For example, recently I tried to join a room address from another server and was told "can't join that because a server address wasn't specified" but another address on the same server says "room not found" so it clearly did know the server address. And there's the whole thing where you have to always be signed into at least one devi…

> If there's ever a time when you're not signed into any device, you have to reset your encryption key, meaning you lose access to all old messages...

That is a deal breaker, IMO. Encryption is great, but it shouldn't come at the price of data loss and a degraded user experience.

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