Re: <nettime> Direction of Travel

[Rich Kulawiec via Nettime-tmp <nettime-tmp@mail.ljudmila.org>]

On Tue, Jun 13, 2023 at 06:36:24PM +0200, John Preston via Nettime-tmp wrote:
> I wonder, maybe it could be a multi-site or federated thing? So if
> people want to host a 'node' then everyone can email that, but it gets
> re-circulated on Riseup or any other provider if we go that route as
> well. That would be very redundant, but I'm not sure if such a thing
> has been done with e-mail mailing lists before. It makes me think more
> of other protocols like UUCP/Usenet and FidoNet.


Distributing a mailing list doesn't really work because of concurrency
issues.  The TL;DR version of that is that doing so would require
multidirectional synchronization of N logs and databases (I'm using
"database" in the generic sense here), and I don't see how that could
be done in Mailman or any other MLM I'm familiar with.

It would also likely bump into problems with RFC 2919 and RFC 2369
headers, with bounce/reject processing, with well...all kinds of things.
So this is a non-starter.

(This is also, quasi-relatedly and incidentally, why plugging mailing lists
into each other is generally bad, as in Egon Spengler "bad", idea. [1])

Plus: it doesn't get you anything worth having.

However, other related things include:

1. Backup/hot spare copies.  I've been doing this for decades, thanks to
rsync and revision/configuration control of the relevant files (e.g., the
Mailman .config files for each mailing list, the sendmail virtusertable
entries, and so on).  This enables a rapid shift to another host if the
primary goes down or is lost entirely.

"Many copies make things safe" isn't always true but it certainly is here.
One of the huge advantages of running on your system is that you can
configure all of this and then have N people maintain copies of the setup.

2. Usenet gatewaying.  Mailing list-to-Usenet (and vice versa) gateways
have been around forever, and they work.  You'd need a newsgroup,
preferably in one of Usenet's main hierarchies.

3. Mastodon.  On my to-do list is checking to see if anyone has built a
mailing-list-to-Mastodon gateway yet. 

4. RSS feeds.  Pretty much anything can be turned into an RSS feed.

5. Gateways to other things (e.g., Twitter, Reddit, etc.) are dubious at
best given the capricious and erratic nature of their ownership and the
accelerating trend toward walled gardens enforced by usurious API fee
structures and arbitrarily-enforced/unenforced ToS.  I see no reason to
invest any effort whatsoever in supporting such transient and disposable
companies.

---rsk

[1] Once upon a time, back in the day, there was a setup that used an
email-to-Usenet gateway to take advantage of Usenet's flood propagation
algorithm combined with multiple Usenet-to-LOCAL-email gateways to
distribute directly to the inboxes of interested parties.  There were
valid technical reasons for this, and it worked -- in large part because
the people running it were highly clueful.  But I don't think this would
be a good idea in the contemporary environment, and I'm hard-pressed to
think of a use case for it.
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