I never understood why mailing lists prosper when newsgroups are mostly dead. Newsgroups are mailing lists done right (or rather, mailing lists are newsgroups done wrong).
> I don't know why, but spam on mailing lists seems relatively rare
Mailing lists have a central place where all messages come in, and that can ban spammers. Usenet is distributed and messages come from everywhere, so any spam protections needs to be done in the client.
I'm not necessarily talking about Usenet in particular but rather the "Network News Transfer Protocol" versus SMTP.
When you subscribe to a mailing list you cannot easily fetch older emails to get some context, you usually have to use some web interface. If you want to manage your subscriptions you have to use an other web interface, you can't usually do it easily from your mail client.
There is no standard way to subscribe to a mailing list either, you have to hunt for the subscription form.
That being said, in this day and age using dedicated protocols is not really "in" anymore so I don't expect NNTP to make a comeback. I still think that a good web forum would still be a massive improvement over most mailing lists.
That's what google groups could have been by the way, if Google had cared enough to make it worthwhile.
Maybe a HN-style discussion "tree" with no upvotes/downvotes or external links but the possibility to add attachements (and maybe gateway interfaces with SMTP and/or NNTP) would be the killer of mailing lists.
> If you want to manage your subscriptions you have to use an other web interface, you can't usually do it easily from your mail client.
This is not true. I haven't seen any mailing list for which I can't manage my subscription with SMTP. They might exists, but almost everyone use mailman which works fine.
> There is no standard way to subscribe to a mailing list either, you have to hunt for the subscription form.
Just send an email to list-join@fqdn or list+subscribe@fqdn. It's really a pity google groups is inferior even to mailman, but I guess you can't have nice things.
Yes, nothing is standardized, but it works well enough with extremely little infrastructure, both on server side, and especially on client side. NNTP requires more infrastructure on both sides.
> This is not true. I haven't seen any mailing list for which I can't manage my subscription with SMTP. They might exists, but almost everyone use mailman which works fine.
You're right, but as you point out that's not standard. It's not usually directly integrated in your mail client. It's just a hack. NNTP clients have all that baked in.
> Yes, nothing is standardized, but it works well enough with extremely little infrastructure, both on server side, and especially on client side. NNTP requires more infrastructure on both sides.
I don't think NNTP requires more infrastructure on the server side (installing mailman vs. installing a NNTP daemon) but you're right that it does require installing a client on the client side (since everybody already has a mail client anyway. That's why I said I would be fine with a well designed web app to replace mailing lists.
> You're right, but as you point out that's not standard. It's not usually directly integrated in your mail client. It's just a hack. NNTP clients have all that baked in.
While not standardised, I expect any decent e-mail client to handle mailing lists mostly automatically at least in that regard, e.g. Claws-Mail builds a nice menu from List-* headers. It is true that one usually needs to manually add filtering on the server side (in Sieve, maildrop or whatever you use), which is not as nice as the standard handling of news, but you can even automatise that if you’re willing to have emails containing random headers create the corresponding folders (which, of course, you shouldn't do).
> I don't think NNTP requires more infrastructure on the server side (installing mailman vs. installing a NNTP daemon) but you're right that it does require installing a client on the client side (since everybody already has a mail client anyway.
Most email clients also have NNTP support baked in, so the client side is not really an issue. However, newsservers have to keep at least a rolling archive of messages and possibly federate with others, whereas a mailman installation is mostly stand-alone and doesn’t even have to keep an archive if you don’t want to.
Back in the 90s, I worked at several ISPs, and let me say that NNTP required more infrastructure than SMTP. First, you need to arrange for NNTP feeds. Then you needed disk space. Tons and tons of disk space, because most of the people using Usenet wanted the alt.binaries.* groups. Skimp out on those, and there was a sizable number of customers who would go elsewhere. Then you needed to configure your expiration policies (posts in alt.binaries.* expire after 24 hours; the rest of Usenet expires in two weeks, that type of stuff).
Then there was the software that supported NNTP---all requiring arcane black arts to keep running smoothly. As much as I loved Usenet back in the day, administrating Usenet (or NNTP) was something I loathed. The server side stuff was just horrible.
Usenet was superior because the average IQ was higher and people more knowledgeable. A normal consequence of access being technologically limited to academia and very tech-savvy people.
Usenet is superior because it evolved to handle large scale discussions properly. These include:
- user agents that thread properly
- long expiration times for local caches (spools)
- cultural norms (that differed from group to group) about replies, new posts, quoting, and FAQs
- groups are folders: the participant needs to make a decision to subscribe to a group, and then each time to read one group at a time, rather than trying to handle a dozen different groups in date-received order
- and for a mixed blessing, search over the current spool was reasonably easy but general search was hard or impossible.
Comparing Usenet or even mailing list cultural posting norms with Reddit is asinine.
I still don't know how I can pipe a reddit comment into patch(1) or git(1). I can do that easily with mbox files (which can come from SMTP or nntp-to-mbox.pl(1) or something).
I did not actually, for some reason I always thought NNTP predated SMTP but wikipedia tells me it was created as an alternative to SMTP for newsgroups[1]. The more you know.
So my first wording was actually correct: "newsgroups are mailing lists done right" :)
