61–70 of 202 posts
how hard is it to run your own smtp gateway in 2025? are you good if you just set up dkim and such?
You also need a server with a good IP address reputation located in a non-sketchy country and a domain that isn't brand-new. And probably more.
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
My concern is more the trend of open groups, even open source projects, centralizing around discord both for dev discussion, community discussion, and technical support. There's incredible value to those discussions to be indexed and searchable on the web, like the good old days of public forums. Actual work took place in public, on mailing lists and forums. It could be indexed and scraped, even just archived to my local machine.
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
Protocols not platforms. Email is something anyone can use without a megacorp giving permission!
Think twice
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 surv…
I'd be really quite hesitant to blur these concepts so casually.
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 >
IIRC there was Delta.chat but no idea how they are doing? (And if they integrate with mailing lists/formatting etc)
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)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Think twice
How so? Just because many people use mega-corp for email doesn't mean you need to. There are tons of alternative, small company providers or you can host your own. None of these require big-corp's support.
Is that true? Is that false? How would one tell? One's own experience will be trivially handwaved away as an anecdote, people's experiences will be handwaved away as hearsay, and a claim of general consensus will be handwaved away by other claims that the person pointing it out is just living in a bubble. Principled thinking? Could be false, could be true, really - both would make sense. Doesn't sound very productive to discuss to me.
If nothing else, surely you can agree that despite what might be, what is is that email is incredibly centralized, right?
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)
The thing is, deltachat really focuses on encrypted-first, and if possible encrypted-only communications in tight-knit groups: servers have no authority, they're merely relays. Mailing lists are not built for that, they're the central authority point where all moderation happens, and being forwarders they can't work with e2ee. In the current setting deltachat isn't built for mailing lists but group or 1-1 communication work very well.