[GoLUG] Mailing list, long term.

[Syeed Ali]

On Mon, 11 Aug 2025 21:10:41 -0400
Steve Litt <slitt at troubleshooters.com> 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.

I have a lot of reading to do, but what immediately comes to mind is:

Why?

Other people have had the same idea, for decades.  Other projects have
been worked on, by many people and for many years.  Other people have
run headlong into problems you haven't yet imagined.

You skipped past the exploration of existing solutions, which should at
least built a list of bullet points detailing why each project is
unsuitable.  The very end of that should be one of:

- Pick one to supply patches
- Pick one to fork and "improve" (cater to your needs)
- Build an alternative from scratch

It feels like you've skipped way ahead.

After reading a bit more, I do see you're addressing some obvious
things, I'll comment there.

----

And at the risk of duplicating what others might have already talked
about downthread...


> In open source projects, clubs and groups, mailing lists serve a very
> different purpose than general purpose email or business
> communications.

Notably, a lot of businesses have moved to Slack and other services
because their needs are quite different.  There are particular needs,
including legal ones, which are served well.  Suitability for
one audience will make it unsuitable for another.


> In Open Source communications, a mailing list's sole
> purpose is to foster cooperative thinking, among many people, to grab
> opportunities and iron out problems. This works very well, because the
> intelligence of the group far outshines the sum of the intelligences
> of its individuals. The preceding sentence completely sums up why
> I'll be creating this new technology.

I don't know if that's described well.

I'd argue that the cooperation of a mailing list was long obsoleted by
a combination of bug/issue trackers.  The random conversations are cool
and all, and also available on any number of forum-like tools or just
IRC-like tools.

Email is a nice clean minimal thing that got hijacked by things like
sending files (attachments of any sort, including web pages) and the
layers of corporate "anti spam" infrastructure that made it hell to
support.


> In Open Source communications, the purpose is *not* any of the
> following:
> 
> - CYA.

That's what archiving does though right?


> - Full conversation archival.

Conversations might need to be referenced in the future.


> - Compatibility with general purpose email.

I guess.  It's just what was available/common at the time.


> - Compatibility with RFCs. RFCs are not infallible.

RFCs are just a way to wrangle all the different interested parties
into agreements for project compatibility.


> - Privacy

Maybe when the internet was small and everyone used a university email
address, but now we have people who want to contribute to open source
projects under real world threatening conditions.


> Yes really. Worrying about privacy on a mailing list is silly, because
> most mailing lists have archives anyway. And once the "mailing list"
> no longer depends on email, you don't need to worry about your email
> address being seen. As far as your name on the mailing list
> (jdlspeedy, basketcase, etc), what can they do with it? They can't
> push any spam to you without pushing it to the MindMeld server, and
> they can't do that without a password, and they can be blacklisted at
> the server level.

Just sounds like a forum or any other contemporary comms platform to me.


> ## FORUMS
> 
> Yeah sure, I want to log into each forum every day and go searching
> for new stuff.

Isn't that how humans operate?  Are you asking about an AI-curated home
page algorithm?  There are places where upvoting help float popular
topics.


> ## GOOGLE GROUPS
> 
> You have to play by their rules, which are constructed for their
> profit, not for your benefit. Rules that change constantly. And if
> you need to move the group elsewhere, your archives are toast.

Applicable to anything not self-hosted, and even self-hosted,
depending...

If I'm not mistaken, there are some swarm-hosted platforms which would
resolve these concerns.


> ## FACEBOOK GROUPS
> ## LINKEDIN GROUPS

I don't know any project which use these communicate for that actual
project.


> ## SLACK

Mentioned above; I agree it's inappropriate.  There are others like it
but they're all special-purpose.


> ## DISCOURSE AND DISCORD

And Guilded.

Same proprietary problems; most of the above can be collected into a
group and disqualified for that.


> ## ALTERNATIVES: A SUMMARY
> 
> If you wonder why, after all these decades, email based mind melds
> still not only exist but thrive, it's because the alternatives are so
> ineffective in creating mind melds.

I don't think you've examined enough actual software projects.


> # MINDMELD DESIGN CONSIDERATIONS
> 
> There will be no "bug tracker", because that's where bugs
> go to die. Instead, bugs will be discussed on MindMeld itself, with
> IRC as a backup should MindMeld go down.

So instead, bugs will go to MindMeld to die?  Because you'd have to
reproduce the functionality of existing ticketing systems to make
something functionality, and you'd also reproduce the same problems
with the same sorts of bugs and humans.


> - What email mailing lists were supposed to be before they failed
>   miserably.

Maybe I didn't read carefully enough, but I'm confused about the
project.  Is there also a need for me to use someone else's new
software to send/receive data? Like, a replacement for my email client
just for this new concept?