[p2p-research] Again on mailing lists, was: Post-Depression first: Americans get more money from government than they give back | csmonitor.com

[M. Fioretti]

On Thu, Nov 26, 2009 08:20:10 AM -0500, Ryan Lanham wrote:
> On 11/26/09, M. Fioretti <mfioretti at nexaima.net> wrote:
> The day this list will enforce the same netiquette applied, without
> any effort, in almost other mailing lists around, many more
> subscribers will regularly engage in conversations. Right now, 90%
> of traffic here is a uselessly verbose flow of unreadable, messed up
> text.
>
> Give us an idea of what a working model would look like (that is,
> another list or process that works better)...I am all for standards
> and improvement.
> ...
> Is P2P always to be an isolated half-baked low tech set of wires and
> gizmos only understandable by the tinkerer?
> ...
> Publish standards.  Propose new tools.  Guide us in our errant ways.

Ryan,

please step down from the pulpit and stop being ridiculous. I'm very
sorry, I understand that this sounds hard, but I really don't know
what else I could write. YOU complained that it seems as nobody is
listening to what you and Paul (IIRC) are saying. I only explained
what is SURELY one of the reason why this happens on this list.

I don't have to publish anything or propose anything new. Standard
mailing list netiquette has been the same for decades now, it's
published all over the net for everybody who cares, is extremely
simple, million people who are anything but "tinkerers" use it
everyday without problems and *remains* the only way to make
conversations on mailing lists open and readable to the highest
possible number of people.

If mailing lists as such are a thing of the past, that's perfectly OK
(seriously!!!), YOU find a better tool and convince others to move
using it. But AS LONG as the channel you are on is a mailing list, you
have to:

- accept the fact that an OLD CHANNEL works much better with ITS OWN old,
  well established, universally known, very simple rules (**), or...
- don't be surprised or sad if almost nobody else bothers opening your
  messages

In other words, if you feel above the limits inherent in mailing
lists, don't use them, but ignoring them would be foolish as long as
what you're on IS a mailing list. So let's close this list for good,
or don't feel sorry if it remains little more than a private chatroom
with a publicly viewable log.

> As for Gmail, I appreciate the arguments that it is not "free."

??? My argument was **only** that Gmail is not P2P: it is a
single-point-of-failure, ultra-centralized service, that is the very
opposite of the models usually advertised here. The software license,
ToS, etc... have nothing to do with that.

     Marco
(**) Private conversations via email are an entirely different issue,
of course. The problems of ignoring netiquette become much more
bearable in that other context.