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.
You say that like it's not already happening. It's happening. Many technical chats are only happening on discord now. Everything single day the volume of current technical knowledge gets smaller.
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.
> 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Mailing lists aren't federated. Everyone has to email one particular address at one particular domain; whoever controls that email address + domain can censor/block emails. (That's a good thing when you're blocking spam!)
If you're OK with the fact that mailing lists are somewhat centralized, there are actually got a ton of great alternatives to pure mailing lists.
All popular open-source web forums support email notifications, and most of them support posting by email, (I know phpBB and Discourse do,) and all of them have sitemaps with crawlable archives.
You can run your own mail server and name server on top. The network of mail is very much federated.
In mail we have so many freedoms. We have become so locked into technology that we have to introduce a term like “federation” to signify the interoperability and freedom of a single component. Mail is federation layered upon federation.
The fact that you can just use a mailings list address as a member of another mailing list gives you even more federation possibilities. All with the simplest of all message exchange protocols.
> You can run your own mail server and name server on top. The network of mail is very much federated.
While I do completely agree with that in theory (and I also love mail) I think it does not stand the reality test because of email deliveravility which tends to be a nightmare.
How do you solve this? Do you use a third party SMTP?
I ran multiple mail servers for years until about 10 years ago (moved out of the industry). The deliverability problem, as far as I know, hasn't really changed that much in the last decade. The key was to configure DKIM, SPF, only use secure protocols and monitor the various black/block-lists to make sure you aren't on them for very long. In my experience, if you end up on a few bad lists, and don't react quickly, the reputation of your domain goes down rapidly and it's harder to get off said lists.
You also want some spam filtering, which, these days, is apparently much more powerful with local LLMs. I used to just use various bayesian classification tools, but I've heard that the current state of affairs is better. Having said that, when you've trained the tool, it does a pretty good job.
It's not "plug-and-play", but it's not that hard. Once you've got it up and running the maintenance load goes to almost zero.
> It's not "plug-and-play", but it's not that hard. Once you've got it up and running the maintenance load goes to almost zero.
This is where I disagree. In my opinion it might not be that hard but the maintenance is really not zero as you just described how you need a reputable IP as a prerequisite and constant monitoring of block lists.
Just having DKIM, SPF and DMARC really was not enough last time I checked for getting delivered to let's say outlook.
I just realised, and this could be red herring, that almost all of the domains I've administered were based in Australia. I suppose it's possible that the IP ranges I'm dealing with have a better reputation than those from other countries. I have administered a few domains from US companies and IPs, but they've often been based in known data centres which may help their cause. I can't really talk to the reliability of hosting a mail server on a consumer / small business IP in the US / Europe/ Asia. It's possible that all known, common IPs in these areas have a natural disadvantage when it comes to reputation. I suppose try running a tunnel from your server to a small VPS in a knwon data centre? Not ideal, but it may help.
It would be annoying if entire US/European/Asian ISP IP ranges were immediately blocked. We should have moved on from that for many reasons unrelated to email.
The monitoring of block lists is much more important than people assume. I haven't looked into it in detail, but it always seemed like the reputation was based on a ratio of number of messages to known bad messages. If you have a moderately busy server, and you manage to keep off the block lists (or at least pro-actively remove yourself from them) then the reputaion gets higher and higher, and the maintenance goes down.
If you're a domain that only receives occasional messages, and you end up on Spamhaus and co, you're gonna have a problem. It seems that reputation at small scale is viral. You need actively good reputation and response time. But, honestly, it seemed that it didn't take more than about 3 months per domain I administered until they were just accepted by the net as valid, good actors.
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.
Who needs the transmission more - the sender, or the recipient?
Much of the time, when it's for signup verification, especially for a free service, they just write "don't use @live.microsoft.com" underneath the email address box. The user wants to be signed up for the service more than the service provider wants a new user, at least by enough to use an alternate email address. Enough cases like this, and the user quits @live.microsoft.com.
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.
The fact that it is a nightmare is a bit of a myth. Granted, not everybody can do it, but that's not necessary.
And then there are many mail providers other than Gmail. It's just that nobody cares and probably the fact that a ton of (most?) people were forced to create a Gmail account by Google.
> The fact that it is a nightmare is a bit of a myth. Granted, not everybody can do it, but that's not necessary.
I agree to some extent. But it is more involved than deploying a Discourse instance in my opinion.
> And then there are many mail providers other than Gmail. It's just that nobody cares and probably the fact that a ton of (most?) people were forced to create a Gmail account by Google.
100% agree. This is the tradeoff I went for. I would love for it to be easier to self host but you can definitely use another provider.
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.
And conspiracy chain mails still pondering on whether or not 9/11 was an inside job. I joined usenet recently to see how the things were, and it had some serious ghost town vibes.
Even without Slack's ransomware-as-a-service business model, being dependent on a specific company is a big problem. If Dropbox decides to ban your country for being running too many AI crawlers, or DejaNews goes out of business, or XOJane decides to pivot to a different market (see http://web.archive.org/web/20171015000000*/http://www.xojane... for example), or LiveJournal gets bought by Russian trolls, it's potentially a big problem.
The sad reality is that for 99.99% or the population: WhatsApp groups, with a solid 1/5 in your requirement list. (Or at least, I hope they get one point, text selection is broken.)
People just not care, they just want to send and recive messages and an easy method to add and remove persons.
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
If the mailing list server tampered with the message, everyone will get the false message. But if it is an encrypted group chat on matrix for example, you can 100% verify that the person posted that message (provided you've verified them, but even if you haven't, your logic of other people having verified it can be used).
As for archiving, you can archive mastodon, lemmy, bluesky, matrix,etc... as you said, if it was important, it can be made so for any open platform. Public archiving services will use APIs instead of mail clients, that's the only difference which shouldn't make a difference to users.
Even on the closed source platform twitter, there are public archives of things. Governments post official communication and records on there. Some governments are experimenting with Git for law publications. Nepal just voted an interim leader over discord!
This nostalgic thinking about mailing lists is incompatible with a technologist's mindset.
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 LIVE IN. Bad technical etiquette on behalf of the habitual mailing-list users is the main reason people hate mailing lists.
===
Editing to also reject some of the points from the article:
"1. Mailing lists require no special software" is utter bullshit. If you accept "must install a mail program", surely you can accept "must install lynx or curl"?
The contrast of 3/4 to forums is utter bullshit. What security/privacy risk is there in using a forum? Are they going to leak my email address or something?
... I don't even want to respond in detail to the rest of the nonsense that follows. Are they talking about some particular forum that hasn't been updated since 1999 or something? Yes these are problems which is why people have made solutions to them ...
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 hundred. Your email client can easily filter those into a virtual folder, and quickly find the messages where you are addressed or threads you're interested in.
Once I have the emails, I have them forever. I am not dependent on some forum remaining online five years from now if I want to go find an old message.
Web forums and wikis just suck for message-based interactions. Email is designed for that and it works really well.
I find that people who complain about email volume are not only unfamiliar with setting up rules to file messages into folders, but entirely uninterested in learning how to leverage their tools that way.
In fact, it seems many of them resent having to learn anything in order to be more productive, instead insisting the burden belongs on others. “I don’t want to get all that email, so it’s OK for me to make you visit a web page several times a day to participate instead.”
And no, Discourse’s “mailing list mode” isn’t sufficient, it’s as garbage as the rest of Discourse, especially when D showed the right way to do this: Mailing list primary, NNTP newsgroup gatewayed (or vice versa), with a web forum for those who insist on one.
It's replicated work for every person who wants to set up filters and notifications. Discord or whatever has defaults that don't require everyone to create their custom environment.
But you trade a lot for not wanting to set up your own custom environment. You only have to set up yours. There is no one size that fits all, and if this flexibility comes with these features mentioned (non-proprietary, federated, archivable, accessible, not dependent on a specific company), then: yes, please! How could anyone not want this?
Nah. The “replicated work” is in deciding what you want your mail folder structure to look like, which is a pretty personal decision; creating the filter on List-Id itself is trivial.
> 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.
I know that mailing clients have gotten worse, but not _that_ worse.
> The contrast of 3/4 to forums is utter bullshit. What security/privacy risk is there in using a forum? Are they going to leak my email address or something?
Most of them employ a whole bunch of google analytics for reasons unclear. That should be sufficient.
---
Though unfortunately I disagree with the OP. Those are arguments as to why it would be nice if email stuck around. But it won't. Just because the problems come from "bad deployments of anti-spam policies" doesn't change the fact that the "bad deployments" are literally _the majority of email_.
> "1. Mailing lists require no special software" is utter bullshit.
Proprietary mediums require and are limited to specific software with limitied functionality, whether in the form or a specific application, or a web interface that only works one way and is missing most functionality.
With email I run whatever email client I like best and can filter, sort, thread, etc just the way I want.
This mostly falls under "Accessible", but want to highlight how incredibly limited the UI is in every proprietary messaging platform. One is forced to interact with it in just one way and it's inevitably missing tons of functionality.
With email, there can be no limits because it is an open standard.
One can pick whichever MUA (email client) one prefers or trivially switch betwen multiple ones without any loss of data.
But even more importantly, if one has custom needs or preferences, that is also easy. All my incoming email goes first through procmail where I can apply various filters and labels and can sort it into different folders and priorities on completely custom criteria that fits what I want.
ActivityPub? Just because people use it as a Twitter clone doesn't mean you can't run mailing list style content on top of it. It would be nice to not use Mastodon-isms if you're trying to go about doing something like that. However it's easy with Mastodon-isms too. Have a bot listen to mentions, use any sort of moderation/accept queue to accept questions, then Reblog the ones you accept.
ATProto would fit most of the bill too here but AP is self-hostable and contained in a way that ATP isn't. AP is also standardized and has gone through standards bodies.
But if you want to write a message in reply or start a new conversation - RSS does not allow that. (In the cases that I use RSS - I will just copy to my mail app - it is more cumbersome than just replying in mail (or usenet via gmane) but this is not something I do often for those lists.
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.
Matrix has/had a great archiver at https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-viewer - but it fell foul of the bizarre failure mode that folks who had explicitly set their rooms to be archivable had subsequently forgotten that they had, and then went absolutely berserk when they discovered their rooms having been archived: https://matrix.org/blog/2023/07/what-happened-with-the-archi.... This was one of the reasons given for libera to turn off the libera<->matrix irc bridge.
At the time we had much bigger problems to deal with, so we shelved it and have yet to get back to it.
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.
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.
I think one of the reasons is that mailing list usage expects/imposes some level of reflection time and editing between sending a new reply. Imagine if every time someone hit enter in slack/teams/discord a new email showed up in a thread somewhere in someone's mail reader.
You can self host an email server, what you can't self host is proprietary features on top of those, but I'm pretty sure you can find alternatives that work with said email server software you picked to self host.
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.
It has all sorts of gamification that gets in the way, it’s easy to over-silo discussions, it has a concept of “answered” that’s not really appropriate for a lot of project level discussion, it has all sorts of other extraneous crap like “reactions,” and—most importantly—it’s fundamentally implemented as a web page that everyone involved needs visit regularly to see when there’s something new and to respond to that.
Discourse would be fine if it were a front end to a mailing list and didn’t have the excess categorization and gamification crap. Instead it’s a web forum with a mailing list mode tacked on by people who never did substantial technical work using mailing lists.
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>