How I run a small discussion mailing list | Hacker News Reader

How I run a small discussion mailing list

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68 pointsgoranmoomin44 comments

Hmm. Seems small enough that it's probably missing a bunch of important cases... the first one I can see is the lack of subscription confirmation. I can't see special-casing for "<>" either. Or prevention from subscribing the mailing list to itself.

That’s a neat script and one of the simplest setups I’ve seen for running a mailing list (even though I don’t understand everything the Lisp is doing).

I’m a massive fan of mailing lists and despite all the other alternatives I think for the right group of people they’re the perfect solution.

* Here comes the shameless plug *

I’m the founder of Gaggle Mail (https://gaggle.email/) which provides dead simple group email. Our customers are as far from the HN crowd as you can get; non-technical, generally elderly but they’re desperate for something simple, with few features that does just what they need - and they’re willing to pay!

There’s a real market for taking what appears as a simple technology to most techies and dumbing it down to make it accessible to a wide and willing market.

It's a great project you have here. Just be careful with the grammar, from the homepage: "Gaggle Mail gives your group it's/its own permanent email address".

Thanks for that, I appreciate it.

Oho! I could really do with a host for a small mailing list to help manage a meetup.

May i be so bold as to ask how the sustainability of this business looks? How likely do you think it is it will still be around a year from now?

I’d say pretty sustainable - but I’m biased!

We’re bootstrapped and have been profitable from day one. We’ve been around for just over 4 years and have about 1500 paying customers.

Years ago I used to run a few such small mailing lists. As far as I remember, I used minimalist [1] and mlmmj [2] at one time, maybe others. Over time they became major pain to maintain due to spam. Not so much in preventing spam messages from reaching subscribers but because various broken spam botnets were constantly hitting weird corner cases and were constantly breaking the lists in various wondrous ways.

That was before the whole "server reputation" became a thing. I'm not touching any kind of automated mail sending these days. I'm not giving AI any more excuse than it already has to randomly blacklist me out of the SMTP world.

[1] https://github.com/madroach/minimalist (?)

[2] http://mlmmj.org

Plug: A friend/former cow-orker has ran FreeLists for, I'm not even sure, 15-20 years now.

It's a fairly straightforward, no bullshit product if you just want a mailing list.

I use Freelists for a tiny mailing list I run and I cannot recommend it highly enough. Setup is a little strange, and some of the admin settings aren't entirely intuitive, but when it's up and running it's excellent.

Mailing lists are the worst way to have discussion. A subreddit on the other hand is the best alternative I found.

Subreddits suck, at least for focused, productive discussions you might want to archive and refer back later. Old-school forums actually work very well for this use case; the only thing they're missing in a present-day context is some level of, e.g. ActivityPub interop.

Yeah, where actually have forums gone? All the software seems to be pretty outdated and you can't throw a stone without hitting someone who is building some new link aggregator or mircoblogging service.

But where are decentralized or just modern platforms focused on discussions, not on people?

Discourse is amazing modern open source forum software. Check it out.

https://discourse.org/ (homepage)

https://meta.discourse.org/ (Software in use)

I wouldn't call it amazing, but it is fine. It's bloated on the frontend side of things, imo.

Way too bloated, if you ask me. Just give me a sane reimplementation of phpBB (i.e. not actually using PHP!) with the addition of interop with the Fediverse, custom clients etc. It would work a lot more smoothly and be more visually attractive as well.

it's bloated on the backend side of things as well.

Yeah, I know that one. It's a blank page until you authorize over 2 dozen external js scripts.

Admittedly, it looks nice after that, but that's a hard pass from me.

I'm running an instance where I've installed one external js. Other than that, I just counted and there are 16 JS files loaded. None of them come from an external domain. Am I misunderstanding what you mean by "over 2 dozen"? Am I misunderstanding what you mean by "external JS scripts"?

I clicked on the above https://meta.discourse.org/ and get a white page. UMatrix tells me it blocked 32 Scripts from one cloudfront domain and 9 from another.

Maybe it's me misunderstanding UMatrix, but I assume "scripts" mean files. Could also be script blocks, though.

Isn’t cloudfront just a CDN?

I’m not surprised that site has more scripts than a bare-bones install like mine, but I guess I’m surprised it’s that many more.

> modern platforms focused on discussions, not on people

One that I know of is https://discourse.org/

What is outdated about it?

The software often seems old and clunky, or with the few newer options like discourse or nodebb, convoluted and bloated.

But I think whats mostly missing these days is amenities social networks have introduced like custom streams and filters. Forums in principle can do things like "Show all posts from user X" or "give me new topics that are tagged Y", but it often didn't even work way back when.

A modern forum should allow to create custom streams to find and consume content and wrap that up in a nice package and these days of course, some form of federation should be possible, be it just RSS feeds or better yet cross posting etc.

You can do that to some extent, with Discourse, by "following" custom search queries.

Facebook groups seems to be the main killer of standalone forums. They first offered a way to create a page that linked to the forum. Then waited until that caught on, then removed the prominent place to link. Voila, the FB group becomes the forum.

A lot of my users migrated to a Facebook group. The quality of discussion on Facebook seems very low however, very few replies to posts, just a bunch of likes / smiley faces.

Yeah, it's not better, but it's "captive" since Facebook made it hard to show that the real forum is somewhere else.

I'm working on one if you can wait a few months :P Maybe less depending on how difficult moving to a new country turns out to be.

Do your have some more info or even some code up yet?

I thought about starting to build something myself from time to time, but in the end it always seems a bit daunting.

That, and that I am never sure if there even are other people who want something like that.

> Yeah, where actually have forums gone?

"Stop necroposting! You have been warned" "You have to login to search" "You need to wait for an administrator to confirm your account before you can login" "You need to have a hight reputation to post" "You cannot post in this subforum" "You haven't posted in the Newbies forum" "[missing image from TinyPic or other 3rd party hosting]" "[missing image due to 3rd party hosting quota limits]" "PMed you the solution"

Yea no thanks.

> But where are decentralized or just modern platforms focused on discussions, not on people?

Stackexchange is one example.

bump

You've spent days, if not weeks searching for any lead on the obscure problem you're facing. You might not even be certain exactly what the problem is, but you're by now intimately familiar with its manifestation. It's clear by now you're probably the first person in ten years menaced by it. Ancient forums with broken CSS, archived mailing lists, dusty blogs; you scrape together enough relevant information to finally craft the search query that will save you, the one that will finally lead you to the result. There. It's done. The results page consists mostly of entries with nonsense text and languages you can't read, but at the top is your answer. You click it. Scanning the original post it's clear you've found your salvation. You scroll through, quicker and quicker, impatient to end it all. Almost there, to the last post. The answer you seek. But, in a flash, it's gone.

"PMed you the solution"

More like "Nvm, I found the problem, it's working now :)"

An even greater betrayal.

https://xkcd.com/979/

The great news is, you can do exactly this on Slack, too!

I think the things you describe actually have more to do with decentralization and small communities then the concept of forums in general. You can see similar weird rules and requirement on mastodon instances these days. And while they can be a deal breaker, often the same quirkiness makes communities interesting in the first place.

I don't think the behavior of toxic communities is solely based on the kind of software they use.

Most of that also happens on Reddit.

The D language has its own forum powered by DFeed, a forum engine built with D (https://forum.dlang.org/). You can also access it as an NNTP or mailing list. Have never seen a discussion software this snappy.

Here's one where you can have HN/Reddit type discussions, crossed with traditional forum software ... & some new ideas: https://github.com/debiki/talkyard (I'm developing it)

> Old-school forums actually work very well for this use case; the only thing they're missing in a present-day context is some level of, e.g. ActivityPub interop.

I never liked web forums. Given me either NNTP or mailing lists.

Both are much easier to go through and see what's new and ignore the threads you're not interested in.

> Old-school forums

Odd spelling of "newsgroups".

> newsgroups

Odd spelling of "BBS's".

In my opinion, Usenet newsgroups are better than mailing lists and far better than a subreddit. A newsgroup allows one to browse and search for posts made before one subscribes and the client allows you to easily see new posts made in a thread, unlike reddit.

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