[GoLUG] Mailing list, long term.

[Steve Litt]

Barry Fishman said on Thu, 14 Aug 2025 11:40:26 -0500

>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".  

>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.

All email clients suck. Claws-mail, Evolution and Mutt suck the least,
but they all suck. Now's my chance not to saddle the user with an email
client.

Also, NNTP has fallen out of use, meaning that I'd get less help with a
NNTP based MindMeld.

>
>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)

I read the isc.org page you recommended. I'd have to learn this big
huge thing, with no guarantee that, in the end, it will do what's
needed without gargantuan kludging.

>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.

The client that *I* write will be dead bang obvious to anyone who has
ever used an email mailing list. Perhaps the ones that other people
write won't be so obvious.

>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.  

Yep! Clean and simple that meets the needs of a community of users.
That's what it's all about. And this community is not the mythical "My
grandmother" or "Newbie and want to stay that way". It's GoLUG, where
everyone is a genius. This description probably fits other technical
user groups. There is ABSOLUTELY NO attempt to attract high school
dropouts who would be more at home with a walled garden that offered
them credits in a company lottery.

>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.

Slight paraphrase:

>"Some large projects, like Gnome, spend so much effort on meeting the
>perceived needs of users that they don't have, that they seem to forget
>the needs of users they already have.

I've never heard it stated so accurately and succinctly. And I'll add a
second sentence:

"With these feature churning projects, follow the money, and you'll
usually be led to a monopolist or oligopolist."

SteveT

Steve Litt 

http://444domains.com