Running our own mailing lists?

Features and Ideas
21

So message arrived as anyone who is subscribed to diaspora-discuss noticed and now I just sent a message to "diaspora-discuss+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com" and instantly got a successfully unsubscribed confirmation. So I do not see any problems with using non-Google emails on our lists. But need to add this information to the wiki, I can take an action point for this.

Btw, I think we should also create a wiki page under community listing who owns and has rights to official Diaspora* resources. I can also take an action point for this.

22

I don’t see any benefit from leaving Google Groups. I’m using it without a Google account, there’s no privacy problem with public mailing lists anyway. I suggest we focus on Diaspora’s issues instead of creating new problems.

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My current understanding is, Google has become point of various types of surveillance hotspot in various areas/services. So my opinion/suggestion is to avoid Google, so that users, contributors can post with free mind. And i think Free mind develops better things and do better discussion. – Bry8Star (Bright Star).

24

so, this is going into the direction of an ideological boycott rather than being out of necessity or convenience (or other actual or perceived benefits)…

25

As said before, if someone feels we should dump the Google mailing lists (for ideological reasons, no functionality is gained) - please make a proposal and we will vote :slight_smile:

Personally I think we have more important things to do. And I also think the Google lists are the best for us functionally. No ones privacy is at stake since we need public lists.

26

Proposal: Run our own mailing list to avoid Google dependancy

Advantages to keep Google :

  • Nothing to manage
  • Already in place
  • Good availability
  • Interaction with user using a G account

Advantages to run our own mailing list :

  • Privacy issue with Google (everything posted on a G service is owned by Google, they can publish a book called “all the secrets of the Diaspora project” if they want :p) (I know the mailing list is already public, but they have the possession of our discussions, it’s not to us anymore.)
  • No Term of Service anymore
  • Really easy to deploy
  • We don’t depend of Google, which means they can’t cut the service or say “it’s not free anymore”

Outcome: N/A

Votes:

  • Yes: 12
  • Abstain: 8
  • No: 11
  • Block: 1

Note: This proposal was imported from Loomio. Vote details, some comments and metadata were not imported. Click here to view the proposal with all details on Loomio.

27

Just catching up on the discussion because I don’t log in regularly to Loomio and only just received an alert about this discussion. I have read previous comments.

A couple of silly questions first: what is this list for? I joined long time ago the mailman list that Yosem set up but later unsubscribed. (I’m not a member of the Google Group). Second silly question: would it not be possible to use Diaspora itself e.g. a specific tag or Loomio? I just feel like we all have enough accounts, logins, etc.

In any case, I tend to think that though it would be preferable not to use Google, it seems to me not the best way to spend energy and resources. I have to admit though that I don’t know how easy or difficult is to set up something new.

28

@Roger a mailman list can be set in less than an hour.

29

Flaburgan, you probably should count the hours maintaining it - never mind upgrading it for security holes etc… Running your own software is never “just one hour”.

30

Plus if we had our own we need to make sure the server is some common D* server - hosting the lists on some users personal server is definitely not ok imho

31

If managing it ourselves is a concern, I suggest we use resources managed by other collectives like Rise Up https://help.riseup.net/en/lists (loom.io is another example, where we are using a service hosted by another collective, where we have a better chance of influencing and even volunteering if required).

32

@Christophe Governance is an important issue for any community and that includes how we manage our resources. Also for a community like ours privacy is not the only factor. Software Freedom is an important factor and this has been considered in most of the decisions about the tools we use to manage our community (github is another discussion). So if you want me to state the problem we are trying to address, I would say “we are depending on a non-free software to run our mailing list.”

33

Praveen you are forgetting that not everybody who participates in Diaspora* has a problem with using non-free software - that assumption can not be made automatically just because Diaspora* itself is open source.

Let’s keep politics and ideology out of this and concentrate on making great software.

34

Jason, I don’t agree. It is the ideology and politics that drives many of us to contribute. So we cannot keep ideology and politics aside. What else is the motivation to give our time and effort? If we are getting paid for our work, we may tell money is a motivation. At least for me the ideology and politics is what motivate me to contribute. And for people who are not driven by ideology, if we can provide the same service with a free software replacement, would they object?

35

I agree with Jason when he says that we have more important things to do. But I know too that our main goal right now is to reach more developers. A lot of persons who are interested by Diaspora are privacy aware, and I really think we are loosing people using a Google Service. I really hesitated before subscribe to the mailing because of Google.

If we want to reach the people who is afraid of Google, two solutions : we run our own mailing list, or we use other services.

Finally, maybe Diaspora + Loomio + Githug is enough, what do you think ? We are not using a lot the mailing list after all…

36

Praveen, different people are motivated by different things. For me putting time in to Diaspora* is not ideological (about free software) - I just want to participate in some kick ass cool open source social networking software. You should not automatically assume open source = free software movement.

The trouble with ideologies is that they always harm the normal people when taken to extremes. I personally don’t really identify myself with the free software movement because sometimes it’s a bit extreme and forgets usability :wink:

But hey, this is why we have voting :slight_smile:

37

If you like you could use the forum I’ve set up:
http://fora.org.uk/diaspora

I run the site and am happy to add others as moderators, and add functionality if needed. Its ad-free and running SMF. If people like emails they can use ‘notify’ function.

38

Also personally I find the google groups ui annoying to use

39

Hi Florian, and thanks for your reply. I should have made clear that I was talking about the diaspora-discuss mailing list, and not the diaspora-dev mailing list. I wasn’t saying that there should not be any mailing lists used for discussion around Diaspora, and I realise that among software developers, mailing lists are popular, so it’s right that a mailing list is used for discussion of development.

I remember the issue of using mailing lists (and Google groups in particular) versus a forum was discussed, and ‘We1’ said ‘we don’t want one’, while ‘We2’ said ‘we want one’. There was no clear majority at the time, but the founders decided to use Google groups, partly for a legal reason, because they were setting up a foundation, and this required that they control any discussion group which was used, and they couldn’t be bothered to set up their own. (Sarah Mei explained this to me on one of her blog posts, but I can’t now find it.)

I think for general discussion and help (recent posts to diaspora-discuss have almost all been requests for help from someone about a particular issue), a forum is better. For one thing, it can be divided up into sections for ‘welcome’, bug reports, help with setting up pods, and so on. This is more efficient than one mailing list in which any time anyone posts any comment about any area of Diaspora, everyone on the mailing list gets notification of this, even if they have no involvement in that area.

Discussion about ‘live’ development issues can remain on a mailing list if the devs prefer that (which, it seems clear, they do). The diaspora-discuss list can remain too, as long as it’s not necessary for community members to subscribe to it in order to keep in touch with what is going on, because a significant number of people have reservations about using Google’s services. (And it does strike me as odd that a FOSS project would use Google, which is kind of anti-freedom. But I realise we all have our individual perspectives.)

There are still the mailman mailing lists (diaspora-grassroots and diaspora-privacy) hosted by Stamford University, which could be used as alternatives.

I do think that wherever possible, methods of discussing Diaspora should be hosted on or by Diaspora, rather than using third-party fora. Sometimes of course, this is not possible, as with Loomio, which is specialised software which provides facilities not provided by free ‘out-of-the-box’ things such as forum or mailing list software.

As to a wish to avoid Google’s services being an ‘ideological boycott rather than being out of necessity or convenience (or other actual or perceived benefits)’, I would say that it is not ideological in my case, it’s about the necessity to avoid giving away personal data about me to companies which make their money by using those data for commercial gain, and the convenience of not having my data used by such companies, and the perceived benefits of remaining free from that sort of intrusion into my life. I realise Google already know far more about me than I’m happy with, but saying that I might as well keep using them is a bit like saying ‘this person has stolen all my earning up til now, so I might as well give them all my future earnings’. So yes, ideological up to a point, but only as far as it impacts on my pragmatically. I came to Diaspora to get away from such intrusion and selling of my data, and I don’t like the fact that I’m expected to allow this intrusion and selling to continue in order to help develop the project.

And using Google does mean a new login, if like me you feel the need to set up a one-time email address in order to subscribe.

OK, lots of points. The main ones are:

  • I think it would be good to have a forum, hosted by Diaspora (for instance, on the diaspora-project.org site) either in addition to or as a replacement of the diaspora-discuss mailing list. I do think a forum has benefits which a mailing list doesn’t, and as things get busier (now that we’ve got proper stable versions, hopefully more people will be attracted to join Diaspora and more people will want to set up pods) this would be a helpful thing to have for specific help and general discussion.
  • It would be preferential, I think, for a project of the size and nature of Diaspora to host discussion fora itself rather than using third-party fora such as Google groups. Particularly as the project is founded on the principle of privacy and security of user data, it seems a bit upside-down to then use a forum hosted by Google, which is founded on the principle of harvesting and ‘monetising’ user data.
40

Sorry that was so long. There’s a tl;dr thing at the end.