💾 Archived View for envs.net › ~pen › gemini › mlrev.gmi captured on 2022-06-11 at 20:55:01. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2022-04-28)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Do we want to revive the mailing list of gemini?
(Just my opinion.)
Please let us use Gemini itself for our content and loose discussions.
… and the other established channels, be it IRC and/or Usenet!
Isn't Usenet more akin to Gemini than a mailing list residing on a single server – whose server?
comp.infosystems.gemini is the first new newsgroup since eight years in the Big-8 hierarchy of Usenet! Let's celebrate!
Long live the newsgroup!
This newsgroup covers the Gemini information space served via the Gemini internet protocol, related concepts and tools created by its community.
Gemini is an internet protocol to primarily serve human readable content. Served content is not limited to text. Transfer is encrypted for privacy.
Most content served by Gemini is written in Gemtext, a primitive markup language that contains a limited set of line types to semantically structure text and link to other resources. Although the protocol is content type agnostic, Gemtext is prevalent in the known information space. As Gemtext can be read without the need of complex clients (such as XHTML browsers) the published information space offers good accessibility. The Gemini protocol and Gemtext content type are not to be extended per definition and community consent.
ftp://ftp.isc.org/pub/usenet/control/comp/comp.infosystems.gemini.gz
-- @ 2022-04-15
gemini://iveqy.com/gemlog/2022-04-15_re_gemini_mailinglist.gmi
This talk is titled "Revitalizing Usenet," and was presented at LibrePlanet 2022 by Tristan Miller.
Tristan is a research scientist at the Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence and a member of Usenet’s Big-8 Management Board. He (co-)maintains several free software packages, including the generic preprocessor GPP and GNU’s moderation tool, STUMP.
This talk is about usenet, which is a worldwide online discussion network that was established in 1980, a decade before the World Wide Web. Unlike Web forums, control of Usenet is not centralized, but is rather distributed across an open federation of independent service providers. This makes the system transparent, robust, resistant to censorship, and most importantly, respectful of users' digital freedoms.
Is the full quote ok?
### The Usenet vs. mailing lists ###
In this writeup, I try to provide a few clues about why one would prefer to
use a (Usenet) news group instead of a mailing list. This is an article I
wrote initially to support the migration of the gopher mailing list to
the comp.infosystems.gopher Usenet group.
So, why is Usenet better than a mailing list?
First I have to say that "better" is probably not the correct term.
"different", yes. For a small project that will run over the course of a few
months with a bunch of people - I'd say go with a mailing list. If we're
talking about a subject that spans over a few years (decades even), with an
uncontrolled amount of subscribers, then Usenet is the way to go.
Myself, I value the fact that Usenet is a truly public place. When a new
subscriber gets the list, he can get the history of past messages right away.
A mailing list doesn't allow such thing (or it requires to go through a clumsy
web-based portal, if the mailing list provides such tool at all).
Resiliency: Usenet is a network of meshed NNTP servers. Should a few servers
go down, no big deal, nothing is lost. Should the mailing list server go down,
you're fucked. This gets me to another point:
Persistence across time. Sooner or later, the mailing list server will cease
business. What then? "Migrating" the users to another mailing list provider.
In the meantime, all past messages are lost from the internet. With Usenet,
this doesn't happen.
The killfile is also a feature that I enjoy much, and pretty much every news
reader implements it. Sure, you could probably emulate it with cryptic rules
in some mail programs, but it's a mess.
Separating mail from public forum. Not everyone cares about this, but I do. I
like to receive on my mailbox only things that I am supposed to answer.
Messages coming from a public forum are distracting me in times when I have
more essential things to attend to.
Spammy additions - most mailing lists like to add some ads to the messages
that are posted by users. I really hate that. If I post something, I want it
to be delivered exactly as I typed it, without additional crap.
Finally, I choose what I want to read (and fetch). If I'm not interested in a
thread, I mark it as ignored, and its messages won't even be downloaded to my
PC (headers only) - while with a mailing list I am forced into getting all the
stuff.
Interested? Learn more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet
```
Mateusz Viste
```