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.
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.
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.
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?
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 ...
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.
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)
I set one up for our HOA as a unified conversation and notification platform. Everyone now has exactly one email address to remember to notify everyone of, say, a graduation party where there might be some extra cars. Nobody needs Facebook, or a Google account for Groups, etc. When people move, their addresses just get updated in the list.
The only trouble I had moderating it is people just love searching for whatever email was sent last to the list, necroing the thread and changing topics to whatever is on their mind. I had to set threads to auto-lock after a week or two of inactivity to force people to start new topics for things that are, well, new topics.
Fun fact: if you change the subject to a reply in Outlook (the desktop client; not sure about 365) it will automatically start a new thread. This feature was added because MS found that the "reply to last e-mail from intended recipients" was a common way for people to compose new e-mails.
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 surveillance easier (PRISM, etc.), and is a prime target of corruption by advertising, propaganda, etc. It robs people of control over their data.
All of these things are either non-issues, or far less of an issue, with decentralized technology invented half a century ago. It is bewildering that we had email, Usenet, DNS, and the internet itself, yet we ended up with strong centralization with the web, which is built on decentralized protocols.
I partly blame the early implementation of the WWW for this. I've written at length about this before[1][2], so I won't repeat it here.
Agree these are advantages:
Mailing lists are simple
- Mailing lists are bandwidth-friendly
- Mailing lists interoperate
- They're asynchronous
- They're portable
- They can be freely interconverted
- They can be written to media and read from it
Disagree these are advantages:
Mailing lists require no special software
- They impose minimal security risk
- They impose minimal privacy risk
- They're push, not pull, so new content just shows up
- They scale beautifully
- they're relatively free of abuse vectors
- They handle threading well
I still use mailing lists, both at work and personally, but they are 1970s technology and it feels like it. We could build mailing lists for this century that keep these advantages and fix what's broken, but there's no business model in it.
What makes them “feel like 1970s technology” to you, and—more importantly—why do you say that like it’s a bad thing?
Most of the opposition I’ve seen to using mailing lists for technical discussion has basically come down to “young people think email is old and gross” and my position is that people reacting that way have some self-reflection to do and to get over themselves.
I mean this is precisly why email is best. Being an open standard, it's not a business. Nobody owns it, nobody can. Those are fundamental to its strenght.
Minimal privacy risk is such a BS "advantage". You put your email out there for everybody to read it. So privacy with mailing lists does not exist
If I want to remain anonymous, I need to register another email address, which is a massive pain in the ass to register AND then to read or reply to the mailing list.
With a forum I register, chose an anonymous nickname and can participate and get updates into my normal inbox anonymously.
I loved and love mailing lists, except for their capacity for ensuring everyone's email addresses are out there in the open for everyone else, including the scammers and spammers. I still use them (very few! and almost none of them are "tech ones"). I have a dedicated email address for them, which is disposable but doesn't look the part. I do wish, though, that many more groups would adopt mailing lists.
I had started a small cinema/lit club/group and got some good traction as well. But everyone wanted to bring in the latest group chat toys, online meet toys. I had proposed (the async) mailing list (private; I had hoped I'd find one), and it was shot down immediately, IIRC, by everyone else.
I have actually argued for the use of mailing lists for corporate engineering discussions. When that becomes the medium for code review or design discussions, there's a nice streamlined workflow. Further, it's practically trivial to write or customize a mailing list reflector. If you have a decent and secure mail client library, you're a weekend away from it just working. Contrast that with customizing or rolling your own IRC, Slack, Discord, or web forum clone. Mailing lists don't suffer from vendor lock-in, and anyone with a mail client and who can follow basic rules can participate.
An invitation-only mailing list with a reflector that verifies PGP encryption and non-repudiation is just fine for most corporate discussions. For mailing lists open to the public, new users can be placed in a moderation queue for a period of time until it's clear that they understand list netiquette and formatting rules.
I think for internal corporate use, NNTP would work even better, if it were still supported in mail clients. I deployed it for exactly that purpose in the late 1990s and it was great.
Fortunately there are IMAP shared mailboxes, which we worked incredibly hard at CMU during the Cyrus project to ensure would work just as well as bboards did in CMU’s previous Andrew Mail System. (“Bulletin boards,” aka bboards, were basically CMU-local Usenet, with global Usenet under a netnews.* hierarchy via a gateway.)
Most IMAP clients worth their salt support shared mailbox hierarchies, even Apple Mail does, so it’s “just” a matter of setting up shared groups on a server.
A lot of these arguments also apply to newsgroups (Usenet), however. It has the same features of being able to use whatever client you want, and can be archived.
Archives can be searched fairly easily, although admittedly most will be incomplete (hence Deja and Google Groups back in the day).
Some newsgroups are still active, but not many. Why? What went wrong?
Can anyone recommend mailing list hosting for a non-public group of about 20-30 people that costs less than $100 per year?
My family plans all of their reunions via e-mail and every year we end up with someone putting an out-of-date e-mail for someone in the list, or forgetting to include someone, or including someone who has asked to not get updates. I offered to host a mailing server, and I may just end up rolling my own on a DO droplet with mailgun or something for reliable delivery because mailing list hosting I could find was rather expensive.
Gaggle Mail (https://gaggle.email) has a free plan and it's cheapest paid plan is $100 per year. It's popular with family groups doing what you describe.
> They can be freely interconverted -- that is, you can move a list
hosted by A using software B on operating system C to host X using
software Y on operating system Z.
Until you start heavily relying on your archive software you use that is accessible over HTTP with links hardcoded in messages. Then you're bound to continue using that software.
I digitized HOA records and initially considered using a collaboration tool like Slack partnered with Google Drive to create an online community.
Although a corporation and their hierarchy can impose tools easily, HOA communities don't have that luxury. You have broad demographics, skills and no time to support any of them.
A bigger issue is credentialing. You don't want the business of helping seniors log into or reset their Slack password.
My ultimate "non-engineering" solution was to use email for everything. A mailing list for communications. Records requests are handled via email with some automation.
There's tremendous opportunity for more email Saas -- like Sourcehut but for other disciplines.
Everyone and everything can do email. It's easy to automate, and authentication is someone else's problem (the recipient only needs access to their inbox).
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]
Absolutely not. Privacy risk depends on how well protected is the weakest point in your network. So if one of the participants' device is compromised then the entire discussion is compromised too.
On closed, proprietary platform you just cut off the weakest point from access to the data when you suspect it is not protected enough, as data it lies on a single server. On mailing list you can't do anything, because data lies on somebody's else's server
I’ve been running Gaggle Mail (https://gaggle.email) for over 10 years, and mailing lists are still very popular in certain circles. They’re especially valued for long-form discussions — legal groups, professional associations, HOAs, and similar communities still rely on them because they’re simple, reliable, and easy to archive.
i am still of the opinion, if they would extend sieve quite a bit and standardize markdown/reST/asciidoc as rendered in emailreaders, we could probably get much more usage of mail again
(sieve would need additional features of sending/processing mails and reencrypting imho)
but mail is still less broken then mobile phone networks.
The federated nature of e-mail is degrading. Most recent example: My kid just registered with CCCApply (the central website for California Community and City colleges).
It took a while. Finally after calling support I found out that the e-mail you get your confirmation code to doesn't work with most e-mail providers (they said custom e-mail domains hardly ever work, Yahoo e-mails never work, Outlook is iffy) so please register with a gmail address (and they offered to help me sign up for gmail if I didn't have it).
An older example: According to a Macy's CS rep, Macy's won't deliver their e-mails to domains registered with godaddy (the actual e-mail provider apparently doesn't matter, but in this case it was Microsoft). My mom has an account with them that she can't access, because she needs to receive an e-mail to login, and she needs to login to change which e-mail address is associated with it.
People need to subscribe to the mailing list, either by sending a subscribe email to the appropriate email address, or via a web interface that is specific to the mailing list server. Once subscribed, you simply send emails to the list’s email address, and receive emails from that address. It’s useful to set up a filter in your email account or email client so that all messages from a given mailing list are automatically sorted into a separate email folder.
This may not be what you're asking, but it's rather trivial if you're setting up an SMTP gateway that proxies traffic to another SMTP that handles the IP address reputation management etc.
E.g. I do that with Exim on my Debian laptop and have it relay outgoing messages to Gmail's SMTP. It's great if what you want out of it is being able to send E-Mail while "offline", the messages will get locally queued until you've got an outgoing connection, much better than relying on individual MUA's to handle that, and it'll work with one-off invocations like piping to mail(1) etc.
Running an smtp server to receive mail is supereasy as long as you have inbound port 25.
Or you can run a submission service that requires submitters to login, usually on port 587/465.
If you want to send from your server, that is way more difficult, requiring all kinds of safeguards, SPF, DKIM, ARC, reputation, etc. They keep making it more complicated, because that's the source of spam.
Or you can just submit mails to a relay, that will send mails for you, this can even be Google or some other MX service. This then always requires you to authenticate with your account.
Hard. You need reverse DNS, which means you need to have a machine with a stable ip, and convince the network operator to set up a PTR reverse DNS record for you. This part is fairly easy if you are renting a VPS with a fixed ipv4 address, just ask the rental company.
You also need to set up mx, dkim, dmarc, spf, and a bunch of other stupid DNS records related to dane/tlsa/mta-sts that aim to put bandaids on top of bandaids on top of what is the shitty unsecured and unencrypted email protocol.
Then you need to fight with a bunch of arcane 90s Unix programs to actually not be gaping security holes that will allow people to relay off of your MTA and get you blacklisted worldwide. You need to fight with a milter and acme client to finally get the TLS stuff right too. Then there's the need to set up a spam filter for your inbox (probably).
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.
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
Usually an email archive of the list is available for download, which you can incorporate into your local archive. In case none is available, what I have sometimes done is to ask a resident member (privately) if they can send me their archive.
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.
And I felt conflicted. Because it sounds great. It makes sense. But I don’t want it and now I’m wondering about what’s appealing about distributing bits of content across platforms.
This is something I can get behind. Fenced gardens.
This person is in a serious bubble. Mailing lists are not used by billions of people.
>Mailing lists require no special software
Even ignoring that most social media are accessible via a web browser instead of their dedicated app, this is just adding more complexity than having a single app for people to use. Everyday people want a single way to do things.
>Mailing lists are simple
No, you have to figure out how to configure a mail client and how to properly respond to things and is no where as user friendly as typical social media apps.
>They impose minimal security risk
Using an external service lets you outsource security to dedicated security teams as opposed to no security team or a volunteer security guy.
>They impose minimal privacy risk.
I trust the privacy of social media than some mailing list where the admin could secretly grep the contents of it with no over site.
>Mailing lists are bandwidth-friendly
The average internet user is scrolling through tiktok, streaming videos. Bandwidth is not a big deal anymore.
>Mailing lists interoperate.
Social media have features for reposting between different groups. There is also copy and paste and links.
>They're asynchronous
There are social media like facebook which are also asynchronous.
>They work reasonably well even in the presence
of multiple outages and severe congestion
Social media is also resistant to outages and have dedicated teams towards keeping it online.
>They're push, not pull, so new content just shows up.
Have you not been on social media for decades? Pushing content to the user is the norm.
>They scale beautifully.
Social media scales to billions of people using them.
>they're relatively free of abuse vectors.
You can't pretend that spam does not exist.
Mailing lists are not mainstream and they never will be. That way of operating did not resonate with people at the scale that is needed to reach even tens of millions of people. Social media works. Chat apps work. Forums can work.
They mention a point where it's like enough to just have a mail client vs learning ui of 687 forums. This is so incredibly idiotic that I am just stunned.
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'm sure someone will come and tell me how all of this is doable with some janky interface or hacks on mailing lists. It's just unfortunate we have to choose. The people on mailing lists often argue vigorously for them, the rest of us are on discord/slack and have no idea they even exist and are repulsed by the usability problems. You can't convince me pasting diffs in an email thread is on par with Github/Gitlab code reviews with no downsides whatsoever.
teddyh|5 months ago
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>
thewebguyd|5 months ago
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.
dfabulich|5 months ago
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.
magicalhippo|5 months ago
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
liendolucas|5 months ago
See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45283887
gus_massa|5 months ago
People just not care, they just want to send and recive messages and an easy method to add and remove persons.
mxchris2121|5 months ago
notepad0x90|5 months ago
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?
o11c|5 months ago
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 ...
jjav|5 months ago
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.
Karrot_Kream|5 months ago
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.
RossBencina|5 months ago
kilroy123|5 months ago
I love the simplicity of it.
renegat0x0|5 months ago
maxloh|5 months ago
throwaway270925|5 months ago
IIRC there was Delta.chat but no idea how they are doing? (And if they integrate with mailing lists/formatting etc)
imcritic|5 months ago
s1110|5 months ago
johanyc|5 months ago
adgjlsfhk1|5 months ago
teeray|5 months ago
The only trouble I had moderating it is people just love searching for whatever email was sent last to the list, necroing the thread and changing topics to whatever is on their mind. I had to set threads to auto-lock after a week or two of inactivity to force people to start new topics for things that are, well, new topics.
aidenn0|5 months ago
IshKebab|5 months ago
STRiDEX|5 months ago
imiric|5 months ago
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 surveillance easier (PRISM, etc.), and is a prime target of corruption by advertising, propaganda, etc. It robs people of control over their data.
All of these things are either non-issues, or far less of an issue, with decentralized technology invented half a century ago. It is bewildering that we had email, Usenet, DNS, and the internet itself, yet we ended up with strong centralization with the web, which is built on decentralized protocols.
I partly blame the early implementation of the WWW for this. I've written at length about this before[1][2], so I won't repeat it here.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43296810
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44327508
perching_aix|5 months ago
I'd be really quite hesitant to blur these concepts so casually.
cnst|5 months ago
Sadly, it's been announced yesterday that the nginx.org mailing lists are being shutdown by end of month (Sept 2025).
P.S. Probably one more reason to look into into the freenginx fork of nginx — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39373327 — their mailing lists are at http://freenginx.org/en/support.html.
jesprenj|5 months ago
nickm12|5 months ago
Disagree these are advantages: Mailing lists require no special software - They impose minimal security risk - They impose minimal privacy risk - They're push, not pull, so new content just shows up - They scale beautifully - they're relatively free of abuse vectors - They handle threading well
I still use mailing lists, both at work and personally, but they are 1970s technology and it feels like it. We could build mailing lists for this century that keep these advantages and fix what's broken, but there's no business model in it.
eschaton|5 months ago
Most of the opposition I’ve seen to using mailing lists for technical discussion has basically come down to “young people think email is old and gross” and my position is that people reacting that way have some self-reflection to do and to get over themselves.
jjav|5 months ago
I mean this is precisly why email is best. Being an open standard, it's not a business. Nobody owns it, nobody can. Those are fundamental to its strenght.
7bit|5 months ago
If I want to remain anonymous, I need to register another email address, which is a massive pain in the ass to register AND then to read or reply to the mailing list.
With a forum I register, chose an anonymous nickname and can participate and get updates into my normal inbox anonymously.
crossroadsguy|5 months ago
I had started a small cinema/lit club/group and got some good traction as well. But everyone wanted to bring in the latest group chat toys, online meet toys. I had proposed (the async) mailing list (private; I had hoped I'd find one), and it was shot down immediately, IIRC, by everyone else.
nanolith|5 months ago
An invitation-only mailing list with a reflector that verifies PGP encryption and non-repudiation is just fine for most corporate discussions. For mailing lists open to the public, new users can be placed in a moderation queue for a period of time until it's clear that they understand list netiquette and formatting rules.
eschaton|5 months ago
Fortunately there are IMAP shared mailboxes, which we worked incredibly hard at CMU during the Cyrus project to ensure would work just as well as bboards did in CMU’s previous Andrew Mail System. (“Bulletin boards,” aka bboards, were basically CMU-local Usenet, with global Usenet under a netnews.* hierarchy via a gateway.)
Most IMAP clients worth their salt support shared mailbox hierarchies, even Apple Mail does, so it’s “just” a matter of setting up shared groups on a server.
amo1111|5 months ago
vrnvu|5 months ago
Old, boring, simple, works.
No ads.
Sophira|5 months ago
Archives can be searched fairly easily, although admittedly most will be incomplete (hence Deja and Google Groups back in the day).
Some newsgroups are still active, but not many. Why? What went wrong?
bell-cot|5 months ago
alberth|5 months ago
aidenn0|5 months ago
My family plans all of their reunions via e-mail and every year we end up with someone putting an out-of-date e-mail for someone in the list, or forgetting to include someone, or including someone who has asked to not get updates. I offered to host a mailing server, and I may just end up rolling my own on a DO droplet with mailgun or something for reliable delivery because mailing list hosting I could find was rather expensive.
shutton|5 months ago
jesprenj|5 months ago
Until you start heavily relying on your archive software you use that is accessible over HTTP with links hardcoded in messages. Then you're bound to continue using that software.
tonymet|5 months ago
Although a corporation and their hierarchy can impose tools easily, HOA communities don't have that luxury. You have broad demographics, skills and no time to support any of them.
A bigger issue is credentialing. You don't want the business of helping seniors log into or reset their Slack password.
My ultimate "non-engineering" solution was to use email for everything. A mailing list for communications. Records requests are handled via email with some automation.
There's tremendous opportunity for more email Saas -- like Sourcehut but for other disciplines.
Everyone and everything can do email. It's easy to automate, and authentication is someone else's problem (the recipient only needs access to their inbox).
kajaktum|5 months ago
[0] https://lkml.org/lkml/2024/1/7/103
layer8|5 months ago
mcdow|5 months ago
perching_aix|5 months ago
pabs3|5 months ago
https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Mailing_Lists
kertoip_1|5 months ago
Absolutely not. Privacy risk depends on how well protected is the weakest point in your network. So if one of the participants' device is compromised then the entire discussion is compromised too.
On closed, proprietary platform you just cut off the weakest point from access to the data when you suspect it is not protected enough, as data it lies on a single server. On mailing list you can't do anything, because data lies on somebody's else's server
shutton|5 months ago
mixcocam|5 months ago
self_awareness|5 months ago
perching_aix|5 months ago
philip1209|5 months ago
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!
deknos|5 months ago
(sieve would need additional features of sending/processing mails and reencrypting imho)
but mail is still less broken then mobile phone networks.
jcgl|5 months ago
2OEH8eoCRo0|5 months ago
aidenn0|5 months ago
It took a while. Finally after calling support I found out that the e-mail you get your confirmation code to doesn't work with most e-mail providers (they said custom e-mail domains hardly ever work, Yahoo e-mails never work, Outlook is iffy) so please register with a gmail address (and they offered to help me sign up for gmail if I didn't have it).
An older example: According to a Macy's CS rep, Macy's won't deliver their e-mails to domains registered with godaddy (the actual e-mail provider apparently doesn't matter, but in this case it was Microsoft). My mom has an account with them that she can't access, because she needs to receive an e-mail to login, and she needs to login to change which e-mail address is associated with it.
landgenoot|5 months ago
commandersaki|5 months ago
jacobgorm|5 months ago
melodyogonna|5 months ago
layer8|5 months ago
People need to subscribe to the mailing list, either by sending a subscribe email to the appropriate email address, or via a web interface that is specific to the mailing list server. Once subscribed, you simply send emails to the list’s email address, and receive emails from that address. It’s useful to set up a filter in your email account or email client so that all messages from a given mailing list are automatically sorted into a separate email folder.
a-dub|5 months ago
avar|5 months ago
E.g. I do that with Exim on my Debian laptop and have it relay outgoing messages to Gmail's SMTP. It's great if what you want out of it is being able to send E-Mail while "offline", the messages will get locally queued until you've got an outgoing connection, much better than relying on individual MUA's to handle that, and it'll work with one-off invocations like piping to mail(1) etc.
SoftTalker|5 months ago
pepa65|5 months ago
Or you can run a submission service that requires submitters to login, usually on port 587/465.
If you want to send from your server, that is way more difficult, requiring all kinds of safeguards, SPF, DKIM, ARC, reputation, etc. They keep making it more complicated, because that's the source of spam.
Or you can just submit mails to a relay, that will send mails for you, this can even be Google or some other MX service. This then always requires you to authenticate with your account.
bruce343434|5 months ago
You also need to set up mx, dkim, dmarc, spf, and a bunch of other stupid DNS records related to dane/tlsa/mta-sts that aim to put bandaids on top of bandaids on top of what is the shitty unsecured and unencrypted email protocol.
Then you need to fight with a bunch of arcane 90s Unix programs to actually not be gaping security holes that will allow people to relay off of your MTA and get you blacklisted worldwide. You need to fight with a milter and acme client to finally get the TLS stuff right too. Then there's the need to set up a spam filter for your inbox (probably).
perching_aix|5 months ago
layer8|5 months ago
riobard|5 months ago
max_|5 months ago
mixcocam|5 months ago
pron|5 months ago
eisa01|5 months ago
People that have been on the list for decades tend to forget this, and wonder why it dies down
layer8|5 months ago
skydhash|5 months ago
tolerance|5 months ago
And I felt conflicted. Because it sounds great. It makes sense. But I don’t want it and now I’m wondering about what’s appealing about distributing bits of content across platforms.
This is something I can get behind. Fenced gardens.
charcircuit|5 months ago
This person is in a serious bubble. Mailing lists are not used by billions of people.
>Mailing lists require no special software
Even ignoring that most social media are accessible via a web browser instead of their dedicated app, this is just adding more complexity than having a single app for people to use. Everyday people want a single way to do things.
>Mailing lists are simple
No, you have to figure out how to configure a mail client and how to properly respond to things and is no where as user friendly as typical social media apps.
>They impose minimal security risk
Using an external service lets you outsource security to dedicated security teams as opposed to no security team or a volunteer security guy.
>They impose minimal privacy risk.
I trust the privacy of social media than some mailing list where the admin could secretly grep the contents of it with no over site.
>Mailing lists are bandwidth-friendly
The average internet user is scrolling through tiktok, streaming videos. Bandwidth is not a big deal anymore.
>Mailing lists interoperate.
Social media have features for reposting between different groups. There is also copy and paste and links.
>They're asynchronous
There are social media like facebook which are also asynchronous.
>They work reasonably well even in the presence of multiple outages and severe congestion
Social media is also resistant to outages and have dedicated teams towards keeping it online.
>They're push, not pull, so new content just shows up.
Have you not been on social media for decades? Pushing content to the user is the norm.
>They scale beautifully.
Social media scales to billions of people using them.
>they're relatively free of abuse vectors.
You can't pretend that spam does not exist.
Mailing lists are not mainstream and they never will be. That way of operating did not resonate with people at the scale that is needed to reach even tens of millions of people. Social media works. Chat apps work. Forums can work.
xigoi|5 months ago
This will only allow them to find the text of the messages, which is public anyway, so what exactly are you worried about?
imcritic|5 months ago
velcrovan|5 months ago
[deleted]
zaptheimpaler|5 months ago
pluto_modadic|5 months ago
pabs3|5 months ago
NooneAtAll3|5 months ago
I think it's primarily due to absence of margins on the sides and thin borders