4 ms·

i run several mailing lists for my community. it's a pain. of all my self-hosted projects, mailman 3 gives me the most ongoing trouble. it's a very complicated

by igor47 3y ago

i run several mailing lists for my community. it's a pain. of all my self-hosted projects, mailman 3 gives me the most ongoing trouble. it's a very complicated piece of software and it's running in an increasingly hostile internet. i literally just spent an entire day finally setting up ARC and learning arcane things about how DMARC and SPF validation will still fail when you've ARC-signed your mailing list messages, but it's okay because lots of providers (really, gmail) will give you "points" for the ARC signing, but also you still should enable conditional DMARC mitigations in case the sending domain has a very restrictive DMARC policy, at which point mailman 3 will munge your From headers making list replies get all janky and confusing for all your non-technical participants. i don't want to be on a mailing list for a bunch of random unrelated people who don't know each other and have no reason to be civil to each other. mailing lists for shared projects make sense, and mailing lists for people who otherwise are somehow engaged in community. a mailing list for random people sharing cool ideas honestly sounds it will either totally die, or will first become really controversial and THEN totally die. even in my social circle, some of the mailing lists i ran were torn apart by politics and people splintered off to start their own mailing lists without the people with "problematic" opinions, only to learn that the "problematic" opinions were what fueled the whole shebang.

sph 3y ago
Thank you for your perspective and sorry for the silly question: can't stupid people be booted from a mailing list? I assume well-intentioned spammers to get around any ban, but I imagine an invite-only mailing list can be told to drop everything sent or received from a particular email, no? My naive hope is that a mailing list with 10 strangers will not devolve into utter chaos immediately. It might fade into irrelevance, sure, but that is just how entropy works.
- igor47 3y ago
  yes, a community can be cultivated. it's okay okay if it's just a moment in time and is meaningful for some and then people move on, it's also okay/wonderful if it takes off and becomes a haven of sanity and togetherness. i'm sorry if i came off as too jaded, i don't mean to dissuade you from trying, and i'm glad you're thinking about it! feel free to ping me if you want more technical tips, or if you want to use my mailman instance instead of trying to shave that particular hairy yak.
  - sph 3y ago
    Maybe if you have an easily-accessible list of best practices to run mailman, I'd love to know. I won't lie to you, hearing you talk about DMARC and SPF makes my hair raise already, I hate dealing with SMTP, and I hoped it would be possible to set Mailman up leveraging third-party platforms (i.e. Postmark, Mailgun, etc.) so I wouldn't have to deal with that nonsense.
- pavel_lishin 3y ago
  > can't stupid people be booted from a mailing list? Of course. If you're the BOFH of the whole thing, you don't even need to get anyone else's approval. But if you do want the community to weigh in on who's "stupid" and who's not, then suddenly you might discover that three out of your ten members actually think that the person in question is a genius and is holding the whole thing together. Four members might think that booting anyone out at all runs counter to the purpose of your mailing list. Two people will privately email you and the "stupid" person, trying to somehow play both sides for no reason you can comprehend. One person will say that if anyone gets kicked out, they'll leave two. And all those numbers may overlap! Moderation is hard.
  - evandale 3y ago
    That sounds easy to solve - tell them to go pound salt. If it's a private mailing list where you're judge, jury, and executioner why would you cater to people who are looking to cause problems? Let them leave, there's a billion more people out there to join your list. Moderation is easy. Moderating without hurting the feelings of anonymous strangers is hard.
    - devilbunny 3y ago
      The list is basically dead, has been for a while, but in its heyday had a very effective moderation by mockery and abuse: The Cult of Father Darwin (https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3209&cid=1412491 https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3209&cid=1412491).
    - pavel_lishin 3y ago
      > That sounds easy to solve - tell them to go pound salt. Then your life becomes easy, because your mailing list becomes empty.
throw0101c 3y ago
> […] mailman 3 gives me the most ongoing trouble. it's a very complicated piece of software and it's running in an increasingly hostile internet. Given that Mailman 2's code was heavily written with Python 2.x in mind, and Python 2 was officially deprecated, I kind of understand why the maintainers felt it would be easier to rewrite things from scratch… but I think Mailman 3 suffered from a form of second-system effect [1] as it seems way more complicated than MM2. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect

by igor47 3y ago

sph 3y ago

Thank you for your perspective and sorry for the silly question: can't stupid people be booted from a mailing list? I assume well-intentioned spammers to get around any ban, but I imagine an invite-only mailing list can be told to drop everything sent or received from a particular email, no? My naive hope is that a mailing list with 10 strangers will not devolve into utter chaos immediately. It might fade into irrelevance, sure, but that is just how entropy works.

igor47 3y ago
yes, a community can be cultivated. it's okay okay if it's just a moment in time and is meaningful for some and then people move on, it's also okay/wonderful if it takes off and becomes a haven of sanity and togetherness. i'm sorry if i came off as too jaded, i don't mean to dissuade you from trying, and i'm glad you're thinking about it! feel free to ping me if you want more technical tips, or if you want to use my mailman instance instead of trying to shave that particular hairy yak.
- sph 3y ago
  Maybe if you have an easily-accessible list of best practices to run mailman, I'd love to know. I won't lie to you, hearing you talk about DMARC and SPF makes my hair raise already, I hate dealing with SMTP, and I hoped it would be possible to set Mailman up leveraging third-party platforms (i.e. Postmark, Mailgun, etc.) so I wouldn't have to deal with that nonsense.
pavel_lishin 3y ago
> can't stupid people be booted from a mailing list? Of course. If you're the BOFH of the whole thing, you don't even need to get anyone else's approval. But if you do want the community to weigh in on who's "stupid" and who's not, then suddenly you might discover that three out of your ten members actually think that the person in question is a genius and is holding the whole thing together. Four members might think that booting anyone out at all runs counter to the purpose of your mailing list. Two people will privately email you and the "stupid" person, trying to somehow play both sides for no reason you can comprehend. One person will say that if anyone gets kicked out, they'll leave two. And all those numbers may overlap! Moderation is hard.
- evandale 3y ago
  That sounds easy to solve - tell them to go pound salt. If it's a private mailing list where you're judge, jury, and executioner why would you cater to people who are looking to cause problems? Let them leave, there's a billion more people out there to join your list. Moderation is easy. Moderating without hurting the feelings of anonymous strangers is hard.
  - devilbunny 3y ago
    The list is basically dead, has been for a while, but in its heyday had a very effective moderation by mockery and abuse: The Cult of Father Darwin (https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3209&cid=1412491 https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3209&cid=1412491).
  - pavel_lishin 3y ago
    > That sounds easy to solve - tell them to go pound salt. Then your life becomes easy, because your mailing list becomes empty.

throw0101c 3y ago

> […] mailman 3 gives me the most ongoing trouble. it's a very complicated piece of software and it's running in an increasingly hostile internet. Given that Mailman 2's code was heavily written with Python 2.x in mind, and Python 2 was officially deprecated, I kind of understand why the maintainers felt it would be easier to rewrite things from scratch… but I think Mailman 3 suffered from a form of second-system effect [1] as it seems way more complicated than MM2. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect