I know about those, but since the lates enshittification flex last year, I am somewhat reluctant to make a reddit account. I might, so thanks pointing me those (I had almost forgotten about them), but this will require some more soul searching.
Re emacs.ch: I noticed, and I have already followed a number of active user from there, but I am currently looking for s.th. outside of social media.
Because I frankly think, that the interaction as structured by the medium, sucks.
This even applies to mastodon. I have come to think that the tweet/toot format is not conductive to a longer drawn out, deeper discussion of whatever topic. I am looking for a culture that is more on the "letter writing" side. I hope you can understand what I mean by that, otherwise my apologies.
You want a mailing list. So am I. Infortunately they are a dying breed. Still pissed at Erisson closing the Erlang mailing list with total disregard for those who used it.
That's why I have been asking here. Sampling the pointer on common-lisp.net was not very successful (I am not done with that yet, but thought it wouldn't hurt to already try another approach in parallel).
@svw@rlonstein@glitzersachen@galdor I like early web mailing lists and forums. I like mailing lists because they don't require active participation, and also the time delay keeps people from rapid fire responding, and equalizes importance with ppl that post less.
I like forums because it is more direct and more fun to "just browse".
Either would be easy to setup nowadays, and maybe there's some tangential boost with the whole smolweb thing.
I personally have no interest in forums: 1/ they force me to come regularly to check for interesting content, 2/ they do not let me block annoying people and 3/ they lower the barrier to contributions and attract low effort messages.
@rlonstein@glitzersachen@galdor@vindarel@pkw@svw The best modern forum software I'm aware of and have used is Discourse. You can set it up to allow mailing-list like subscription (you can respond via email, its quite nice) among other things. It eliminates the need to regularly check on it etc.
WRT operating a forum: I have zero experience and given the recent (20 years) legislation (-> content liability, data protectiong, copyright law) in the EU I for my part feel a bit afraid to operate a mailing list or a forum while being citizens in the EU.I simply don't know enough about the legislative stumbling stones.
The is a reason I have not been operating a public facing platform for >15 years.
I generally prefer usenet and mailinglist against forums. Being able to download articles locally and the fact that everything is self contained text allows one to build private archives of things on e does want to get back to later.
For the purpose of the argument I'll unashamedly conflate usenet and mailinglists, because U think the media are very similar as seen from the user side. (...)
A fundamental issue with Usenet is that read state is client side, meaning that I cannot follow discussions on multiple clients (e.g. a workstation, a laptop, my phone, etc.).
Ah, yes. I can totally see that. I wonder if there is some way around that, like a web based news read that you can put on your own server. Never researched that topic: Last time (I see, I'm gonna say that a lot), last time I read usenet seriously "multiple clients was an unaffordable" luxury and also not useful: What's the use of having multiple PCs in your single office from which to read usenet...
I am not sure. The protocol of course was different, no registration was required and you did not actually NEED a mail address (though I think you got sanctioned then if you didn't). At least reading was possible completely passive.
For me the difference were the available clients which supported threading very well and ranking/scoring messages so you didn't have to read everything in high volume groups. (...)
@galdor@pkw@svw@rlonstein
(...) AFAIR in "gnus" this worked thred based, so you could just suppress a thread you got tired with and be done.
On the other side, since "gnus" also has a mail backend, you can do all this with mailing lists as well.
The take home message, IMHO: Since all processing and ranking and displaying is done client side, both media make for a very similar, possibly highly customized experience.
@galdor@glitzersachen@svw@rlonstein IIRC usenet was more forum like so threading worked. The headers would have references to parent messages. You know how mailing lists only basically have "list topic" and "sub topic".
IIRC usenet has arbitrary nesting and can split off and the tree structure is more cohesive.
For example if a discussion diverges it is less confusing on usenet. Follow the path you're interested in.
BUT, I started using usenet again recently and would not propose it.
I'd like to contradict here: Mail clients enter the IDs of messages one replies to in the header field "In-Reply-To". I haven't looked at raw usenet messages yet, but I think it's even the same mechanism. Both, mail and usenet support arbitrary nesting. It's only some mail clients that really suck at displaying nested threading properly.
However, the References header was also defined in 1987 by RFC 1036 (section 2.2.5), the standard for USENET news messages. That definition was much tighter and more useful than the RFC 822 definition: it asserts ...
+1 for quoting the RFC. I seem to remember some mail clients also sucked at filling in "In-Reply-To", right. Though the limited group using a mailing list could probably be convinced to use a real mail client(tm) (*)
>> BUT, I started using usenet again recently and would not propose it.
The question is rather, I think, how do we get a community together at all, not what software we can use for communication. There, my time being limited, I'd rather prefer stuff that already exists(*). I can always build a nice discourse server fro me alone. But then, I can write letters to myself already.
(*) At least I cannot push in good conscience a "solution" I cannot say "I'll do it".
I think that is the point. Especially with common #lisp.
The community is just too small to realistically expect there to be more than a couple of thriving venues. The tooling is less important than the people.
It would be great to have better interfaces, or, even better, multiple ones depending on your preferences (activity pub?), but at the end of the day it's the participants who make it valuable, not if you have proper threading or whatever.
@pkw@svw@glitzersachen@galdor@rlonstein You can of course always interact with the Lemmy Lisp group using ActivityPub. It works flawlessly with Mastodon. You can follow the group, post from Mastodon etc.
@svw I actively post about Lisp on Mastodon, and to the Lisp Community on Lemmy every now and then. I'm open to other platforms as long as they're open. Personally, Reddit is a deal breaker since last year's enshittification.
I encourage all those posting about Lisp on Mastodon to add appropriate hashtags. In fact, it's how I found this discussion.
@galdor@glitzersachen@svw@rlonstein Usenet is weird until you use it, because it's more forum in some senses but more mailing list in others.
I used to read usenet with slrn, and I've said before I think that's where the idea of blocking came from at least in part.
(In usenet speak you had kill lists which was a good idea.)
(...) Looking at their archives I see that mailing list and usenet archives are mostly intact, even after 25 years. Whereas forums are often subject to substantial link rot (people upload stuff to pastebin or imgur or whatever, then link to that in their message). Apart from the fact that forums typically have no archive an are dependent on being still operated by their owners for past messages being accessible. (...)
(...) Possibly I am just being on a trip to memory lane, but comp.os.* and comp.lang.* and some language specific mailing lists where really useful to me in the past specifically because of those properties. Trying to get, e.g. Minix 2 running on a vintage piece of hardware: There would have been no contemporary peer at the time who'd have been been able to help with this specific problem. (...)
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