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> Mailing lists are far too outdated. Forums are good, and some good people out there are still developing them. WTF? How is it even remotely sane to provide

> Mailing lists are far too outdated. Forums are good, and some good people out there are still developing them. WTF? How is it even remotely sane to provide a user interface instead of an API/protocol? I don't care to learn your forum's user interface, and I don't care to poll your forum for new content. I have a mail user agent that's configured to fit my needs and that I know well how to operate, and that's where all the mailing lists that I am subscribed to push their new content into this one unified interface for me to interact with them. Web forums for the most part are just a pile of broken usability.

username223 10y ago
> How is it even remotely sane to provide a user interface instead of an API/protocol? It's the way of the world. 20 years ago we had NNTP, POP, and IMAP, and you could read them all with Gnus, customized with finely-tuned filtering and killfiles. But it's hard to "unlock value" from these things, so then there were ad-strewn forums, and now SaaS abominations, because how dare you not change your mail client when its developer thinks you should?
orangeshark 10y ago
Why not both? Something like DFeed[1] which is used as the D programming language's forum[2]. [1] https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed [2] https://forum.dlang.org/ https://forum.dlang.org/
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 10y ago
  Yeah, sure, provide as many user interfaces as you like, just not instead of an API/protocol. The whole point is that everyone can choose the UI they prefer, or build their own if they like.