Loomio
Wed 14 Nov 2012 6:26PM

Running our own mailing lists?

PP Petar Petrović Public Seen by 139

I thought it would be a cool idea to have our own, independent Mailman mailing lists somewhere and not to rely on Google Groups.

A lot of people who like Diaspora* are privacy aware and are not comfortable with sharing their email info with Google. I have a spare Linode instance, so I could host those mailing lists, only if anyone is interested in having something like that.

JR

Jason Robinson Wed 14 Nov 2012 6:48PM

Personally I find the Google lists quite ok. The mailing list needs to be public anyway so Google will know about the emails where ever the mailing list is hosted :)

If someone feels strong about this we can always vote on the subject.

PP

Petar Petrović Wed 14 Nov 2012 7:39PM

Yeah, I find Google Groups pretty easy to use when it comes to actual usage. However, if we are independent of Facebook and others in social networking, we should also have our own infrastructure. Just a thought of mine.

JR

Jason Robinson Wed 14 Nov 2012 7:54PM

We don't really have any own infrastructure - code is hosted at Github, dev and community talk at Loomio, various things here and there and most of it probably lives on Amazon servers where many pods also live :)

Of course there could be other better options than Google and those should be considered. But if most people are happy with the Google lists it prob isn't worth changing and making everyone having to subscribe and update all the pages, etc :)

G

goob Wed 14 Nov 2012 10:58PM

There is a Mailman mailing list, which was set up by Yosem last year. It has fallen out of use in the chaos of the first half of this year, but I would like to see it used again. I'd be happy to use it, where I'm not happy to post to Google groups.

https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/diaspora-grassroots

F

Flaburgan Thu 15 Nov 2012 9:49AM

Mailman is something really easy to deploy and I don't like Google too.

We have to choose looking independence vs productivity

JR

Jason Robinson Thu 15 Nov 2012 10:58AM

I suggest someone does a clear proposal about this (in this discussion). Something like "Use mailman or other self-maintained mailing lists instead of Google groups". I'll vote no so I won't be proposing it either ;)

The problem really is hosting the stuff. Google gives it for free to us. Let us say we host our self-controlled mailing lists on someones own server. What if that person leaves the community? Kind of messy. Google takes out this problem. And all the posts are public anyway so Google will index them wherever they are hosted. But of course we can vote :)

FS

Florian Staudacher Thu 15 Nov 2012 11:53AM

Personally, I have no problem with the mailing lists being hosted on Google, since I am assuming they already know anything about what I (or anybody else) do on the Internet, regardless of whether I give it to them or if they have to crawl for it.
Since [insert what Jason said], it's just more convenient to use Google.

PP

Petar Petrović Thu 15 Nov 2012 3:28PM

There's one thing that annoys me big time. Namely, as far as I have tried, you are unable to subscribe to a mailing list on Google Groups if you don't have a Google account. Since I am running my own mail server, I cannot participate in any mailing list that is hosted on Google. This is a big drawback if you ask me.

Or there IS a way to join a mailing list with a non - Google email address?

FS

Florian Staudacher Thu 15 Nov 2012 4:30PM

unless they changed something, it should be possible, like any old mailing list:
https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/wiki/How-to-use-the-Mailing-Lists

G

goob Thu 15 Nov 2012 5:00PM

You can subscribe to the mailing list using the method Florian provides (although it's a bit hit-and-miss, took several attempts before I was subscribed). I don't see a way of unsubscribing from the mailing list, however.

Personally I'd much rather drop mailing lists completely in favour of some sort of forum which anyone can join, so that we choose when to see what has been posted. I need to be subscribed to the mailing lists in order to keep informed of anything important, but it is annoying (to me) to keep receiving emails concerning things which I have nothing to do with and which are not of interest or importance to me.

So my vote would be: ditch Google groups and set up a forum instead. There was a good one, diasporaforum.org, but the person who ran that (Ryan Kohles) seems to have been one of the casualties of all the turmoil in D* since the end of last year - he closed the forum and isn't replying to messages. But a similar forum on the diaspora-project site would be perfect. Keep everything in-house where possible is best, so we don't have to sign up with unconnected organisations in order to keep in touch with and discuss D*.

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