free collaborative tools for low BW and losy connections

Mon Mar 30 12:52:52 UTC 2020

On Mon, Mar 30, 2020 at 06:30:16AM -0500, Joe Greco wrote:
> Actual text traffic has been slowly dying off for years as webforums
> have matured and become a better choice of technology for nontechnical
> end users on high speed Internet connections.

My view is that the move to web forums is a huge downgrade.  Mailing lists
are vastly superior.

Here's a (large) snip from http://www.firemountain.net/why-mailing-lists.html
(which I wrote) with a comment from me shoved in the middle.

[...]

1. Mailing lists require no special software: anyone with a sensible mail
client can participate. Thus they allow you to use *your* software with the
user interface of *your* choosing rather than being compelled to learn 687
different web forums with 687 different user interfaces, all of which range
from "merely bad" to "hideously bad".

2. Mailing lists are simple: learn a few basic rules of netiquette and a couple
of Internet-wide conventions, and one's good to go. Web forums are complicated
because all of them are different. In other words, participating in 20
different mailing lists is just about as easy as participating in one; but
participating in 20 different web forums is onerous.

3. They impose minimal security risk.

4. They impose minimal privacy risk.

Points 3 and 4 stand in stark contrast to the security and privacy risks
imposed on users of web forums and "social" media, especially the latter.

5. Mailing lists are bandwidth-friendly -- an increasing concern for people on
mobile devices and thus on expensive data plans. Web forums are
bandwidth-hungry.

6. Mailing lists interoperate. I can easily forward a message from one list to
another one. Or to a person. I can send a message to multiple lists. I can
forward a message from a person to this list. And so on. Try doing this with
web forum software A on host B with destinations web forum software X and Y on
hosts X1 and Y1. Good luck with that.

7. They're asynchronous: you don't have to interact in real time. You can
download messages when connected to the Internet, then read them and compose
responses when offline.

8. As a result of 7, They work reasonably well even in the presence of multiple
outages and severe congestion. Messages may be delayed, but once everything's
up again, they'll go through. Web-based forums simply don't work.

9. They're push, not pull, so new content just shows up. Web forums require
that you go fishing for it.

10. They scale beautifully.

11. Mailing lists -- when properly run -- are highly resistant to abuse.
Web forums, because of their complexity, are highly vulnerable to software
security issues as well as spam/phishing and other attacks.

	[ I'm going to interject a comment here that's not on the web
	page I'm quoting myself from.  There are, of course, counter examples
	to this.  There is a very busy very well-known mailing list that
	is an absolute cesspool of trivially-blockable spam.  Hence
	the phrase "when properly run", becase when that's done spam incidents
	should be at the 1 per year level or less.  It's not that hard.]

12. They handle threading well. And provided users take a few seconds to edit
properly, they handle quoting well.

13. They're portable: lists can be rehosted (different domain, different host)
rather easily.

14. They can be freely interconverted -- that is, you can move a list hosted by
A using software B on operating system C to host X using software Y on
operating system Z.

15. They can be written to media and read from it. This is a very non-trivial
task with web forums.

16. The computing resources require to support them are minimal -- CPU, memory,
disk, bandwidth, etc.

17. Mailing lists can be uni- or bidirectionally gatewayed to Usenet. (The main
Python language mailing list is an example of this.) This can be highly useful.

18. They're easily archivable in a format that is simple and likely to be
readable long into the future. Mail archives from 10, 20, even 30 or more years
ago are still completely usable. And they take up very little space. (Numerous
tools exist for handling Unix "mbox" format: for example, "grepmail" is a
highly useful basic search tool. Most search engines include parsers for email,
and the task of ingesting mail archives into search engines is very well
understood.)

19. You can archive them locally...

20. ...which means you can search them locally with the software of *your*
choice. Including when you're offline. And provided you make backups, you'll
always have an archive -- even if the original goes away. Web forums don't
facilitate this. (Those of who've been around for a while have seen a lot of
web-based discussions vanish forever because a host crashed or a domain expired
or a company went under or a company was acquired or someone made a mistake or
there was a security breach or a government confiscated it.)

[...]

---rsk