Date: Tue, 07 Nov 2023 18:14:23 +0000
To: bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org
From: Andrew Chow <lists@achow101.com>
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Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] Future of the bitcoin-dev mailing list
Precedence: list

Hi Dan,

I don't think nostr would be a suitable replacement for the mailing=20
list, although this opinion is biased by the fact that I do not use=20
nostr and find it to be uninteresting.

 From my limited understanding of how nostr works, it's not clear to me=20
how a distributed system that uses message broadcast would work in the=20
same way as a mailing list. How would people "subscribe"? How would=20
archives be searched or otherwise be available to people who are not on=20
nostr? How do you distinguish and filter between legitimate dev posts=20
intended for discussion and random crap and shitposting as shows up on=20
social media?

I also don't think that long form text on nostr (or any similar=20
platform) can sufficiently replace email. None of these things seem to=20
contain a way to have a separate subject line as email does. Subjects=20
are immensely important for me as it provides a quick and easy way to=20
filter out things I don't care about reading. I don't want to have read=20
something in before I can decide that I don't care about reading it.

In general, I strongly prefer email, or a platform that has email as a=20
first class user interface, over platforms such as nostr, matrix, or web=20
forums. Email is universal - everyone has one and everyone knows how it=20
works. It dramatically lowers the barrier of entry. Having to make an=20
account somewhere or download some specific client in order to=20
participate will simply result in only the most dedicated participating.=20
Development in open source must be an open process and the barriers to=20
entry should be low.

Lastly, IIRC the plan is to shut down the list by the end of this year.=20
Any solution that requires custom software and bridges to be created are=20
not going to be viable in this time frame.


Andrew

On 11/07/2023 12:03 PM, Ademan via bitcoin-dev wrote:
> Hi Bryan,
>=20
> I don't really want my first (and last?) devlist message to be a fairly=
=20
> off-the-cuff post on this topic, but here we go anyway.
>=20
> At the risk of sounding like a nostr evangelist (I promise I'm not), I=20
> want to suggest nostr as a potential replacement to the mailing list. A=
=20
> decent chunk of software would need to be written, but none of the=20
> alternatives seem particularly attractive to me. I particularly dislike=
=20
> the idea of locking into a single siloed forum service like the=20
> bitcointalk forums. I realize I may be in the minority of course.
>=20
>=20
> Nostr enables the ML team to outsource all of its biggest burdens, if it=
=20
> chooses:
>=20
> - mail server blocking is N/A to nostr
>=20
> - Hosting costs are completely outsourced unless the ML team chooses to=
=20
> host a relay.
>=20
> - Archives and web portal access can be similarly outsourced because any=
=20
> nostr archive is self-authenticating.
>=20
> - The ML team can also choose to completely outsource moderation, as=20
> nostr is (more or less) permissionless by nature.
>  =C2=A0 I understand if there is a "blessed" communication system, the ML=
=20
> team would probably prefer to keep it high quality. To that end there=20
> are proposals for proof-of-work, and web of trust based blocklists for=20
> nostr which are optional for end users. There are other options such as=
=20
> the "moderated communities" proposal which would provide tighter control.
>=20
>=20
> On the user side, the optional moderation is very attractive, allowing=20
> controversial threads to exist and continue, without requiring everyone=
=20
> to see them.
>=20
>=20
> The following do not currently exist (to my knowledge) and would need to=
=20
> be implemented to meet the ML's requirements:
>=20
> - an email gateway to satisfy the bulk of existing ML subscribers
>  =C2=A0 This reintroduces issues with mail server blocking of course.
> - a long-form oriented nostr client (current plain text clients could be=
=20
> used in the meantime)
>=20
> That admittedly is quite a lot of work, but the second item can be=20
> deferred, and the first is not particularly technically challenging, the=
=20
> complications are all on the administration side.
>=20
> I expect some reflexive NACKs based on the immaturity of the ecosystem=20
> but if we have months to prepare, I believe the core requirements can be=
=20
> solidly satisfied in time, the rest can be developed over time, and I=20
> believe the advantages are worth careful consideration.
>=20
> Cheers,
> Dan
>=20
> On Tue, Nov 7, 2023 at 9:38=E2=80=AFAM Bryan Bishop via bitcoin-dev=20
> <bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org=20
> <mailto:bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org>> wrote:
>=20
>     Hello,
>=20
>     We would like to request community=C2=A0feedback and proposals on the
>     future of the mailing list.
>=20
>     Our current mailing list host, Linux Foundation, has indicated for
>     years that they have wanted to stop hosting mailing lists, which
>     would mean the bitcoin-dev mailing list would need to move somewhere
>     else. We temporarily avoided that, but recently LF has informed a
>     moderator that they will cease hosting any mailing lists later this
>     year.
>=20
>     In this email, we will go over some of the history, options, and
>     invite discussion ahead of the cutoff. We have some ideas but want
>     to solicit feedback and proposals.
>=20
>     Background
>     =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D
>=20
>     The bitcoin-dev mailing list was originally hosted on
>     Sourceforge.net. The bitcoin development mailing list has been a
>     source of proposals, analysis, and developer discussion for many
>     years in the bitcoin community, with many thousands of participants.
>     Later, the mailing list was migrated to the Linux Foundation, and
>     after that OSUOSL began to help.
>=20
>     Linux Foundation first asked us to move the mailing list in 2017.
>     They internally attempted to migrate all LF mailing lists from
>     mailman2 to mailman3, but ultimately gave up. There were reports of
>     scalability issues with mailman3 for large email communities. Ours
>     definitely qualifies as.. large.
>=20
>     2019 migration plan: LF was to turn off mailman and all lists would
>     migrate to the paid service provider groups.io <http://groups.io>.
>     Back then we were given accounts to try the groups.io
>     <http://groups.io> interface and administration features. Apparently
>     we were not the only dev community who resisted change. To our
>     surprise LF gave us several years of reprieve by instead handing the
>     subdomain and server-side data to the non-profit OSUOSL lab who
>     instead operated mailman2 for the past ~4 years.
>=20
>     OSUOSL has for decades been well known for providing server
>     infrastructure for Linux and Open Source development so they were a
>     good fit. This however became an added maintenance burden for the
>     small non-profit with limited resources. Several members of the
>     Bitcoin dev community contributed funding to the lab in support of
>     their Open Source development infrastructure goals. But throwing
>     money at the problem isn=E2=80=99t going to fix the ongoing maintenan=
ce
>     burden created by antiquated limitations of mailman2.
>=20
>     Permalinks
>     =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D
>=20
>     Linux Foundation has either offered or agreed to maintain archive
>     permalinks so that content of historic importance is not lost.
>     Fortunately for us while lists.linuxfoundation.org
>     <http://lists.linuxfoundation.org> mailman will go down, they have
>     agreed the read-only pipermail archives will remain online. So all
>     old URLs will continue to remain valid. However, the moderators
>     strongly advise that the community supplements with public-inbox
>     instances to have canonical archive urls that are separate from any
>     particular email software host.
>=20
>     Public-Inbox
>     =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D
>=20
>     https://public-inbox.org/README.html
>     <https://public-inbox.org/README.html>
>=20
>     =E2=80=9CPublic Inbox=E2=80=9D decentralized archiving - no matter wh=
at mailing list
>     server solution is used, anyone can use git to maintain their own
>     mailing list archive and make it available to read on the web.
>=20
>     Public Inbox is a tool that you can run yourself. You can transform
>     your mbox file and it makes it browsable and viewable online. It
>     commits every post to a git repository. It's kind of like a
>     decentralized mail archiving tool. Anyone can publish the mail
>     archive to any web server they wish.
>=20
>     We should try to have one or more canonical archives that are served
>     using public-inbox. But it doesn't matter if these are lost because
>     anyone else can archive the mailing list in the same way and
>     re-publish the archives.
>=20
>     These git commits can also be stamped using opentimestamps,
>     inserting their hashes into the bitcoin blockchain.
>=20
>     LKML mailing list readers often use public-inbox's web interface,
>     and they use the reply-to headers to populate their mail client and
>     reply to threads of interest. This allows their reply to be properly
>     threaded even if they were not a previous subscriber to that mailing
>     list to receive the headers.
>=20
>     public-inbox makes it so that it doesn't really matter where the
>     list is hosted, as pertaining to reading the mailing list. There is
>     still a disruption if the mailing list goes away, but the archives
>     live on and then people can post elsewhere. The archive gets
>     disconnected from the mailing list host in terms of posting. We
>     could have a few canonical URLs for the hosts, separate from the
>     mailing list server.
>=20
>     mailman problems
>     =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D
>=20
>     Over the years we have identified a number of problems with mailman2
>     especially as it pertains to content moderation. There are presently
>     a handful of different moderators, but mailman2 only has a single
>     password for logging into the email management interface. There are
>     no moderator audit logs to see which user (there is no concept of
>     different users) acted on an email. There is no way to mark an email
>     as being investigated by one or more of the moderators. Sometimes,
>     while investigating the veracity of an email, another moderator
>     would come in and approve a suspect email by accident.
>=20
>     Anti spam has been an issue for the moderators. It's relentless.
>     Without access to the underlying server, it has been difficult to
>     fight spam. There is some support for filters in mailman2 but it's
>     not great.
>=20
>     100% active moderation and approval of every email is unsustainable
>     for volunteer moderators. A system that requires moderation is a
>     heavy burden on the moderators and it slows down overall
>     communication and productivity. There's lots of problems with this.
>     Also, moderators can be blamed when they are merely slow while they
>     are not actually censoring.
>=20
>     Rejection emails can optionally be sent to
>     bitcoin-dev-moderation@lists.ozlabs.org
>     <mailto:bitcoin-dev-moderation@lists.ozlabs.org> but this is an
>     option that a moderator has to remember to type in each time.
>=20
>     Not to mention numerous bugs and vulnerabilities that have
>     accumulated over the years for relatively unmaintained software.
>     (Not disclosed here)
>=20
>     Requirements and considerations
>     =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=
=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D
>=20
>     Looking towards the future, there are a number of properties that
>     seem to be important for the bitcoin-dev mailing list community.
>     First, it is important that backups of the entire archive should be
>     easy for the public to copy or verify so that the system can be
>     brought up elsewhere if necessary.
>=20
>     Second, there seems to be demand for both an email threading
>     interface (using mailing list software) as well as web-accessible
>     interfaces (such as forum software). There seems to be very few
>     options that cater to both email and web. Often, in forum software,
>     email support is limited to email notifications and there is limited
>     if any support for email user participation.
>=20
>     Third, there should be better support for moderator tools and
>     management of the mailing list. See above for complaints about
>     problems with the mailman2 system.
>=20
>     Burdens of running your own mailing list and email server
>     =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=
=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=
=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D
>=20
>     If you have never operated your own MTA you have no idea how
>     difficult it is to keep secure and functional in the face of
>     numerous challenges to deliverability. Anti-spam filtering is
>     essential to prevent forwarding spam. The moment you forward even a
>     single spam message you run the risk of the server IP address being
>     added to blacklists.
>=20
>     The problem of spam filtering is so bad that most IP addresses are
>     presumed guilty even if they have no prior spam history, such as if
>     their network or subnetwork had spam issues in the past.
>=20
>     Even if you put unlimited time into managing your own email server,
>     other people may not accept your email. Or you make one mistake, and
>     then you get into permanent blacklists and it's hard to remove. The
>     spam problem is so bad that most IPs are automatically on a
>     guilty-until-proven-innocent blacklist.
>=20
>     Often there is nothing you can do to get server IP addresses removed
>     from spam blacklists or from "bad reputation" lists.
>=20
>     Ironically, hashcash-style proof-of-work stamps to prevent spam are
>     an appealing solution but not widely used in this community. Or
>     anywhere.
>=20
>     Infinite rejection or forwarding loops happen. They often need to be
>     detected through vigilance and require manual sysadmin intervention
>     to solve.
>=20
>     Bitcoin's dev lists being hosted alongside other Open Source
>     projects was previously protective. If that mailing list server
>     became blacklisted there were a lot of other people who would notice
>     and complain. If we run a Bitcoin-specific mail server we are on our
>     own. 100% of the administrative burden falls upon our own people.
>     There is also nothing we can do if some unknown admin decides they
>     don't like us.
>=20
>     Options
>     =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D
>=20
>     Web forums are an interesting option, but often don't have good
>     email user integration. At most you can usually hope for email
>     notifications and an ability to reply by email. It changes the model
>     of the community from push (email) to pull (logging into a forum to
>     read). RSS feeds can help a little bit.
>=20
>     Many other projects have moved from mailing lists to forums (eg
>     https://discuss.python.org/ <https://discuss.python.org/> =E2=80=
=93 see
>     https://lwn.net/Articles/901744/ <https://lwn.net/Articles/901744/>
>     ; or https://ethresear.ch/ <https://ethresear.ch/>), which seem
>     easier to maintain and moderate, and can have lots of advanced
>     features beyond plaintext, maybe-threading and maybe-HTML-markup.
>=20
>     Who would host the forum? Would there be agreement around which
>     forum software to use or which forum host? What about
>     bitcointalk.org <http://bitcointalk.org> or delvingbitcoin.org
>     <http://delvingbitcoin.org>? There are many options available. Maybe
>     what we actually want isn=E2=80=99t so much a discussion forum, as an=
 'arxiv
>     of our own' where anons can post BIP drafts and the like?
>=20
>     Given the problems with mailman2, and the decline of email
>     communities in general, it seems that moving to mailman3 would not
>     be a viable long-term option. This leaves us with Google Groups or
>     groups.io <http://groups.io> as two remaining options.
>=20
>     groups.io <http://groups.io> is an interesting option: they are a
>     paid service that implements email communities along with online web
>     forum support. However, their public changelog indicates it has been
>     a few years since their last public change. They might be a smaller
>     company and it is unclear how long they will be around or if this
>     would be the right fit for hosting sometimes contentious bitcoin
>     development discussions...
>=20
>     Google Groups is another interesting option, and comes with
>     different tradeoffs. It's the lowest effort to maintain option, and
>     has both an email interface and web forum interface. Users can
>     choose which mode they want to interact with.
>=20
>     For the Google Groups web interface, you can use it with a non-gmail
>     account, but you must create a Google Account which is free to do.
>     it does not require any personal information to do so. This also
>     allows you to add 2FA. Non-gmail non-google users are able to
>     subscribe and post email from their non-gmail non-google email
>     accounts. Tor seems to work for the web interface.
>=20
>     Will Google shut it down, will they cut us off, will they shut down
>     non-google users? The same problem exists with other third-party host=
s.
>=20
>     The moderation capabilities for Google Groups and groups.io
>     <http://groups.io> seem to be comparable. It seems more likely that
>     Google Groups will be able to handle email delivery issues far
>     better than a small resource-constrained operation like groups.io
>     <http://groups.io>. ((During feedback for this draft, luke-jr
>     indicates that Google Workspaces has been known to use blacklisted
>     IPs for business email!))
>=20
>     On the other hand, groups.io <http://groups.io> is a paid service
>     and you get what you pay for... hopefully?
>=20
>     Finally, another option is to do literally nothing. It's less work
>     overall. Users can switch to forums or other websites, or private
>     one-on-one communication. It would remove a point of
>     semi-centralization from the bitcoin ecosystem. It would hasten
>     ossification, but on the other hand it would hasten ossification and
>     this could be a negative too. Moderators would be less of a target.
>=20
>     Unfortunately, by doing nothing, there would be no more widely used
>     group email communication system between bitcoin developers.
>     Developers become less coordinated, mayhem and chaos as people go to
>     different communication platforms, a divided community is more
>     vulnerable, etc. BIP1 and BIP2 would need to be revised for other
>     venues.
>=20
>     The main categories of what to move to are: web forums, mailing
>     lists, and hybrids of those two options. Most everything is either
>     self-hosted or you pay someone else to host it. It's kind of the
>     same problem though. It largely depends on how good is the software
>     and unfortunately running your own MTA that forwards mail is not a
>     good option.
>=20
>     Going forward
>     =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D
>=20
>     We'd like to invite feedback and proposals from the community, and
>     see what options are available. One potential option is a migration
>     to Google Groups, but we're open to ideas at this point. We
>     apologize for any inconvenience this disruption has caused.
>=20
>=20
>     Bitcoin-dev mailing list moderation team
>=20
>     Bryan Bishop
>     Ruben Somsen
>     Warren Togami
>     various others.
>=20
>     --=20
>     - Bryan
>     https://twitter.com/kanzure <https://twitter.com/kanzure>
>     _______________________________________________
>     bitcoin-dev mailing list
>     bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org
>     <mailto:bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org>
>     https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev
>     <https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev>
>=20