[GoLUG] Mailing list, long term.

[Barry Fishman]

On 2025-08-11 21:10:41 -04, Steve Litt wrote:
> Within 2 years I'm going to make a new, better mailing list
> technology that does what mailing lists should have done all along. For
> the rest of this document I'll call the new non-email mailing list
> software "MindMeld", the working title, and the general concept of
> remote group collaboration as "mind meld".

This certainly is an area that has had problems.  There have been, as
you have pointed may attempts at doing this.  The domain seems to be the
spectum between IRC and Discourse.  I will avoid the proprietary systems
since I think they are non-starters for this group.  I know I feel that
way.


 - IRC: Which requires a continuous online presence and is
   focused on quick one line chat, but is difficult for the expression of
   complex ideas.  There is no means of threading conversations.

 - Discourse: A full forum, where multiple topics are communicated in
   separate conversations, but is really too much overhead for small
   groups, and build on using a web browser, which many of us would like
   to avoid. It seems more suited for very large groups like Window
   Systems (Gnome), or OS's (Fedora).

> ## DISCOURSE AND DISCORD
>
> Now which is which and does what? Their house, their rules, toasted
> archives.

I think Discourse and Discord are two quite different approaches.  Even
mailing list have rules.  Discourse does seem to have a problem being
able to extract messages and threads for your own storage.  This seems
to be a problem with any WEB based application.

But I think you skipped over some other technologies like Matrix It
interconnects with IRC and does provide history, but extracting of
articles and threads seems to be a problem.

But there still is NNTP.  Shares an article format with e-mail, and has
common threading and supports gateways with e-mail.  It can support
multiple servers, and login.  It can also do moderated groups, so that
articles can be subject to validation by trusted parties if spam becomes
a problem.  It can be read by many e-mail clients like Claws, GNOME
Evolution, Thunderbird, and Emacs GNUS.  I know that GNUS, which I use
lets me copy news articles and threads I want to keep into my own
folders.

The INN server is still under active development at
"https://www.isc.org/othersoftware/#INN", and there is a GIT repository,
"https://github.com/InterNetNews/inn" where you can look at the code and
track/file bug reports. (Unfortunately on GitHub)

It also avoids the difficult security measures that e-mail now requires.
The ability of setting up multiple (validated) servers may not be of
initial benefit, but it might make transition between servers easier,
since you can overlap their availability.  You don't have to connect to
any commercial servers.

The one think e-mail has is that it is generally used, and with systems
like Substack growing, likely to remain a common understood means of
communication.  NNTP somewhat sidesteps the issue with support on common
Free Software mail clients, that I suspect most of us use.

But I really don't want to discourage you from writing an alternative.
Besides the learning experience, there is always an opportunity to find
new ways of looking at a problem and producing clean simple solutions
that meet the needs of a community of users.  My biggest problems with
some large projects like Gnome, is they spend so much effort on meeting
the perceived needs of users that they don't have, they seem to forget
the needs of users they already have.

-- 
Barry Fishman