Please, inform us of an alternative which is:
• Non-proprietary
• Federated
• Archivable
• Accessible
• Not dependent on a specific company
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.
You say that like it's not already happening. It's happening. Many technical chats are only happening on discord now. Everything single day the volume of current technical knowledge gets smaller.
We don't want casual discourse to be indexed to the public. Instead we'll host a wiki system soon that bubbles up technical chatter into worthy articles.
Is that a reasonable compromise?
But the fact that Discord itself can't search Discord is beyond stupid. It's just a void of knowledge, people help other people, answer questions
And then they do it again, because search is completely useless.
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.
In mail we have so many freedoms. We have become so locked into technology that we have to introduce a term like “federation” to signify the interoperability and freedom of a single component. Mail is federation layered upon federation.
The fact that you can just use a mailings list address as a member of another mailing list gives you even more federation possibilities. All with the simplest of all message exchange protocols.
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
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?
Client accessibility is up to the individual user. They can choose whatever client fits them best.
I don’t know any mailing list software that signs messages as a sort of “yes, this message did travel through the mailing list” verification. Were it that important I’m sure it’s possible. But having identical messages on 1000 subscribers computers has to stand for something.
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.
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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 ...
Mailing lists I access with my preferred mail client and environment.
Receiving "10,000 emails per day" would only happen on a very active list. In most cases you're talking about a dozen or at worst a few hundred. Your email client can easily filter those into a virtual folder, and quickly find the messages where you are addressed or threads you're interested in.
Once I have the emails, I have them forever. I am not dependent on some forum remaining online five years from now if I want to go find an old message.
Web forums and wikis just suck for message-based interactions. Email is designed for that and it works really well.
I know that mailing clients have gotten worse, but not _that_ worse.
> 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?
Most of them employ a whole bunch of google analytics for reasons unclear. That should be sufficient.
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Though unfortunately I disagree with the OP. Those are arguments as to why it would be nice if email stuck around. But it won't. Just because the problems come from "bad deployments of anti-spam policies" doesn't change the fact that the "bad deployments" are literally _the majority of email_.
Proprietary mediums require and are limited to specific software with limitied functionality, whether in the form or a specific application, or a web interface that only works one way and is missing most functionality.
With email I run whatever email client I like best and can filter, sort, thread, etc just the way I want.
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.
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 love the simplicity of it.
But if you want to write a message in reply or start a new conversation - RSS does not allow that. (In the cases that I use RSS - I will just copy to my mail app - it is more cumbersome than just replying in mail (or usenet via gmane) but this is not something I do often for those lists.
IIRC there was Delta.chat but no idea how they are doing? (And if they integrate with mailing lists/formatting etc)
The thing is, deltachat really focuses on encrypted-first, and if possible encrypted-only communications in tight-knit groups: servers have no authority, they're merely relays. Mailing lists are not built for that, they're the central authority point where all moderation happens, and being forwarders they can't work with e2ee. In the current setting deltachat isn't built for mailing lists but group or 1-1 communication work very well.
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.
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.
I'd be really quite hesitant to blur these concepts so casually.
Besides, this distinction has been discussed ad nauseam, and is not interesting. Especially since when contrasted with centralization, which was my main point, both concepts avoid its issues.
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.
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.
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.
But maybe I should have said late 80s, early 90s tech. In the 70s, if you were communicating with others on a computer, you were almost certainly using the exact same software on the exact same time-shared system, where at least there was a symmetry of experiences (but no multimedia). The explosion of email clients happened in the 90s, mostly.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
(Note, the article in the IETF mailing list does mention Usenet too)
Old, boring, simple, works.
No ads.
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?
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.
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.
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).
"Just use mutt" as a reply to "I want to read this one email thread" is rather missing the point. Plus the reality is most people neither use nor want mutt. Many people think the UX on mutt is horrible. Nice if it works for you, but it doesn't for many. So there's that.
The https://lore.kernel.org site is actually fairly decent, but limited to Linux kernel stuff and some adjacent projects. Gmane was quite nice too, but now defunct (the web UI anyway).
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
Async communications are underrated.
[2]: I did open-source my other project recently, though - so it's not an entirely hollow intention!
(sieve would need additional features of sending/processing mails and reencrypting imho)
but mail is still less broken then mobile phone networks.
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.
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.
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.
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).
how many decades has it been since this was actually the default config?
People that have been on the list for decades tend to forget this, and wonder why it dies down
Good that you can get the archive, it still has a quite high setup cost for people not used to mailing lists compared to visiting a Discourse forum
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.
This will only allow them to find the text of the messages, which is public anyway, so what exactly are you worried about?
Discourse is a "mailing list with the interface". It allows both replies over email and starting a new topic over email.
I think it's primarily due to absence of margins on the sides and thin borders
