[qdotme]

I think people (especially those who joined the internet after the .com bubble) underestimate the level of decentralization and federation coming with the old-school (pre web-centric mainframe-like client mentality) protocols such as email and Usenet and maybe even IRC.

Give me “email” PR process anytime. Can review on a flight. Offline. Distraction free. On my federated email server and have it work with your federated email server.

And the clients were pretty decent, at running locally. And it still works great for established projects like Linux Kernel etc.

It’s just pain to set up for a new project, compared to pushing to some forge. But not impossible. Return the intentionality of email. With powerful clients doing threading, sorting, syncing etc, locally.

[JoshTriplett]

I'm older than the web. I worked on projects using CVS, SVN, mercurial, git-and-email, git-with-shared-repository, and git-with-forges. I'll take forges every time, and it isn't even close. It's not a matter of not having done it the old way, it's a matter of not wanting to do it again.

[qdotme]

I guess we might have opposite experiences. Part of which I understand - the society moved on, the modern ways are more mature and developed… but I wonder how much of that can be backported without handing over to the centralized systems again.

The advantage of old-school was partially that the user agents, were in fact user agents. Greasemonkey tried to bridge the gap a bit, but the Web does not lend itself to much user-side customization, the protocol is too low level, too generic, offering a lot of creative space to website creators, but making it harder to customize those creations to user’s wants.

[abc123abc123]

I'm older than the trees, but, younger than the mountains! Email all day, all the way. Young people are very fascinated and impressed by how much more I can achieve, faster, with email, compared with their chats, web 3.0 web interfaces, and other crap.

Yes, it takes time to learn, but that is true for anything worthwhile.

[stackghost]

What I like about git-and-email-patches is the barrier to entry.

I think it's dwm that explicitly advertises a small and elitist userbase as a feature/design goal. I feel like mailing lists as a workflow serve a similar purpose, even if unintentionally.

With the advent of AI slop as pull request I think I'm gravitating to platforms with a higher barrier to entry, not lower.