The sad reality is that for 99.99% or the population: WhatsApp groups, with a solid 1/5 in your requirement list. (Or at least, I hope they get one point, text selection is broken.)
People just not care, they just want to send and recive messages and an easy method to add and remove persons.
ActivityPub? Just because people use it as a Twitter clone doesn't mean you can't run mailing list style content on top of it. It would be nice to not use Mastodon-isms if you're trying to go about doing something like that. However it's easy with Mastodon-isms too. Have a bot listen to mentions, use any sort of moderation/accept queue to accept questions, then Reblog the ones you accept.
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 sometimes wonder why there aren't any chat-based apps/UIs for mailing lists? Think UIs in the style of Discord/Slack/Teams/etc but with email/mailinglist(s) as backend.
IIRC there was Delta.chat but no idea how they are doing? (And if they integrate with mailing lists/formatting etc)
Mailing lists aren't federated. Everyone has to email one particular address at one particular domain; whoever controls that email address + domain can censor/block emails. (That's a good thing when you're blocking spam!)
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.
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?
This mostly falls under "Accessible", but want to highlight how incredibly limited the UI is in every proprietary messaging platform. One is forced to interact with it in just one way and it's inevitably missing tons of functionality.
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.
Hard. You need reverse DNS, which means you need to have a machine with a stable ip, and convince the network operator to set up a PTR reverse DNS record for you. This part is fairly easy if you are renting a VPS with a fixed ipv4 address, just ask the rental company.
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).
This may not be what you're asking, but it's rather trivial if you're setting up an SMTP gateway that proxies traffic to another SMTP that handles the IP address reputation management etc.
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.
Running an smtp server to receive mail is supereasy as long as you have inbound port 25.
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.
I set one up for our HOA as a unified conversation and notification platform. Everyone now has exactly one email address to remember to notify everyone of, say, a graduation party where there might be some extra cars. Nobody needs Facebook, or a Google account for Groups, etc. When people move, their addresses just get updated in the list.
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.
Fun fact: if you change the subject to a reply in Outlook (the desktop client; not sure about 365) it will automatically start a new thread. This feature was added because MS found that the "reply to last e-mail from intended recipients" was a common way for people to compose new e-mails.
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.
I hate mailing lists, even if I recognize some of their benefits. A forum like Discourse is infinitely better in usability - to view, browse, search, follow specific threads or forums and mute the rest, do DMs, do real nested replies, embed rich media and code with proper formatting and just have a nice interface to work with. It looks like they even support ActivityPub federation recently. Although its GPL not MIT. I'm sure someone will come and tell me how all of this is doable with some janky interface or hacks on mailing lists. It's just unfortunate we have to choose. The people on mailing lists often argue vigorously for them, the rest of us are on discord/slack and have no idea they even exist and are repulsed by the usability problems. You can't convince me pasting diffs in an email thread is on par with Github/Gitlab code reviews with no downsides whatsoever.
The value of the federated/decentralized nature of email is hard to overstate.
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.
Mailing lists are horrible for people new to a list, as you have no history to search in your inbox and the UI to browse the archives are beyond atrocious.
People that have been on the list for decades tend to forget this, and wonder why it dies down
I’ve been running Gaggle Mail (https://gaggle.email) for over 10 years, and mailing lists are still very popular in certain circles. They’re especially valued for long-form discussions — legal groups, professional associations, HOAs, and similar communities still rely on them because they’re simple, reliable, and easy to archive.
All this is true but mailing lists UI sucks. Please tell me how you navigate a tree of messages? It is not easy to tell who is this responding to and who responds to it. Yes, it can be figured out but why does the tree change as I navigate it? [0]
I digitized HOA records and initially considered using a collaboration tool like Slack partnered with Google Drive to create an online community.
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).
I loved and love mailing lists, except for their capacity for ensuring everyone's email addresses are out there in the open for everyone else, including the scammers and spammers. I still use them (very few! and almost none of them are "tech ones"). I have a dedicated email address for them, which is disposable but doesn't look the part. I do wish, though, that many more groups would adopt mailing lists.
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.
Can anyone recommend mailing list hosting for a non-public group of about 20-30 people that costs less than $100 per year?
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.
I have actually argued for the use of mailing lists for corporate engineering discussions. When that becomes the medium for code review or design discussions, there's a nice streamlined workflow. Further, it's practically trivial to write or customize a mailing list reflector. If you have a decent and secure mail client library, you're a weekend away from it just working. Contrast that with customizing or rolling your own IRC, Slack, Discord, or web forum clone. Mailing lists don't suffer from vendor lock-in, and anyone with a mail client and who can follow basic rules can participate.
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.
56 comments
[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 55.8 ms ] threadPlease, inform us of an alternative which is:
• Non-proprietary
• Federated
• Archivable
• Accessible
• Not dependent on a specific company
— <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43972038>
People just not care, they just want to send and recive messages and an easy method to add and remove persons.
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.
IIRC there was Delta.chat but no idea how they are doing? (And if they integrate with mailing lists/formatting etc)
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.
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?
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.
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.
Old, boring, simple, works.
No ads.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43296810
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44327508
People that have been on the list for decades tend to forget this, and wonder why it dies down
[0] https://lkml.org/lkml/2024/1/7/103
Async communications are underrated.
[1]: https://booklet.group
[2]: I did open-source my other project recently, though - so it's not an entirely hollow intention!
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).
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.
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.
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.