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... I'm not convinced. You can continue an existing thread with known individuals without the mailing list, true. And that undeniably has value, and can be us
by Groxx 6y ago
... I'm not convinced.
You can continue an existing thread with known individuals without the mailing list, true. And that undeniably has value, and can be used to re-form connections after loss of the mailing list, and that's great. It both adds value to ongoing use of emails and adds value beyond its lifespan (compared to not ever existing).
But the list is how many people contribute. The list is how general discussions occur. The list is how new contributors join and contribute, as they lack other connections. Without the list, which can be censored just like github, a massive connection-increasing piece of the community is still gone. I feel pretty confident arguing that that is the feature that separates git from github, and email from mailing lists, and it's no more resistant to censorship than any other centralized system.
- ddevault 6y agoA good practice when firing off an email to a list like this is to do a git blame on nearby code, identify the maintainers, and come up with a list of people to Cc directly on the email. If you can get the git repo, you don't need the list to contribute. It helps, for sure, but you can work without it pretty easily. And as I said in the article, I don't think it would be necessary to turn off the list in the event of a DMCA request, at least not on SourceHut. On GitHub the git repo is the single source of truth, so when a git repo is pulled, so too go the issues, pull requests, and so on. Not so on SourceHut.
- zaarn 6y agoWhy would these things remain on sourcehut if they get a DMCA filing? If you do not take the offending material offline, you open yourself to a lawsuit and if you do, new contributors have no way of accessing this data. Open issues and similar will likely also get lost unless restores, unless you count "exists in someone's inbox/archive" as "the issues and pull requests continue to exist". Because in my opinion, that's barely better than having no backup as all relational data in regards to these things is lost.
- ddevault 6y agoBecause it does not contain offending material.
- zaarn 6y agoNow just supposed it would (someone includes it in the mail text body) and someone would file a DMCA against the mailing list? I can't imagine it would be too unlikely, considering that the mailing list also contains patches and part of YT-dls problems was that the source code and/or documentation included such things. If they popped up during development in a mailing list, it would just as much be a target. "No it doesn't" isn't a valid DMCA defense.
- ddevault 6y agoThen removing the offending material can be done without shutting off the mailing list entirely. I mentioned this in the article. On GitHub, everything - bugs, pull requests, wikis, code - is baked into one thing, your repository, which is taken down as a whole. On SourceHut these features can work just fine independently of one another, and if not all of them contain offending material, there's no reason to turn them all off.
- akerl_ 6y agoThis seems like a weird distinction to make. GitHub could equally delete single issues or single PRs or wiki pages or even single files in a repo. They don’t, but that they don’t isn’t because your GitHub repo is “baked into one thing”, it’s because they’ve chosen to apply the DMCA at the repo level rather than playing whack a mole with your content. Using a mailing list archive instead of an issue list doesn’t change that dynamic. What changes it is that you’ve decided to use more targeted DMCA compliance for SourceHut, which is noteworthy. But the delta here is a policy delta, not a technological limitation on GitHub’s part.
- ddevault 6y ago
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]