Yes, I was hoping to check out ladybird browser project, but they use discord.

I'm gradually switching our in-person community to Revolt [0] because we want to self-host and own the data. (Discord offers extreme convenience, but it's a black-box for-profit platform.)

We don't want casual discourse to be indexed to the public. Instead we'll host a wiki system soon that bubbles up technical chatter into worthy articles.

Is that a reasonable compromise?

[0] https://revolt.handmadecities.com

> It's asking for knowledge to be lost.

You say that like it's not already happening. It's happening. Many technical chats are only happening on discord now. Everything single day the volume of current technical knowledge gets smaller.

You can run your own mail server and name server on top. The network of mail is very much federated.

In mail we have so many freedoms. We have become so locked into technology that we have to introduce a term like “federation” to signify the interoperability and freedom of a single component. Mail is federation layered upon federation.

The fact that you can just use a mailings list address as a member of another mailing list gives you even more federation possibilities. All with the simplest of all message exchange protocols.

I loved Usenet back in the day, but I sort of wonder why organisations keep their servers running. I struggle to find any active newsgroups these days. Weirdly enough spam still hits some of the groups.

Even without Slack's ransomware-as-a-service business model, being dependent on a specific company is a big problem. If Dropbox decides to ban your country for being running too many AI crawlers, or DejaNews goes out of business, or XOJane decides to pivot to a different market (see http://web.archive.org/web/20171015000000*/http://www.xojane... for example), or LiveJournal gets bought by Russian trolls, it's potentially a big problem.

Mailman 3 is acceptable, imho. It's been a few years since I worked with it, but I was able to design a reliable public instance of it (https://mailman.haskell.org) with a few days of effort, including the migration from mailman v2.

Besides GNU Mailman, there’s also Sympa [0]. It’s fairly straightforward to set those up on a VPS with Debian or similar if you’re familiar with running a Linux server.

[0] https://www.sympa.community/

I’ve heard good things about <https://mailinabox.email>.

Same for self-hosted mail...

My problem with forums is that I am forced to use a web browser and access them through their provided interface. A lot of them, especially the older ones, are seriously hard to use and even worse on mobile.

Mailing lists I access with my preferred mail client and environment.

Receiving "10,000 emails per day" would only happen on a very active list. In most cases you're talking about a dozen or at worst a few hundred. Your email client can easily filter those into a virtual folder, and quickly find the messages where you are addressed or threads you're interested in.

Once I have the emails, I have them forever. I am not dependent on some forum remaining online five years from now if I want to go find an old message.

Web forums and wikis just suck for message-based interactions. Email is designed for that and it works really well.

> Literally any open-source forum or wiki meets all the requirements except possibly "federated" (depending on whether people set up a dump->restore to another machine), but is much more welcoming to ad-hoc contributors who don't want to subscribe to 10,000 emails per day just to get replies to their own posts.

I know that mailing clients have gotten worse, but not _that_ worse.

> The contrast of 3/4 to forums is utter bullshit. What security/privacy risk is there in using a forum? Are they going to leak my email address or something?

Most of them employ a whole bunch of google analytics for reasons unclear. That should be sufficient.

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Though unfortunately I disagree with the OP. Those are arguments as to why it would be nice if email stuck around. But it won't. Just because the problems come from "bad deployments of anti-spam policies" doesn't change the fact that the "bad deployments" are literally _the majority of email_.

Yes that works to read them - and I do use that.

But if you want to write a message in reply or start a new conversation - RSS does not allow that. (In the cases that I use RSS - I will just copy to my mail app - it is more cumbersome than just replying in mail (or usenet via gmane) but this is not something I do often for those lists.

I think Matrix is a good upcoming contender. The available clients are not really mature yet though. Element is excessively heavyweight and bloated, being Electron based. Other clients all seem to miss some essential feature or other. And there's no good archiving solution yet.

Deltachat is still alive and well, you can see it evolve on their blog: https://delta.chat/en/blog

The thing is, deltachat really focuses on encrypted-first, and if possible encrypted-only communications in tight-knit groups: servers have no authority, they're merely relays. Mailing lists are not built for that, they're the central authority point where all moderation happens, and being forwarders they can't work with e2ee. In the current setting deltachat isn't built for mailing lists but group or 1-1 communication work very well.

Mailing lists are largely a different mode of communication than chat, as alluded to in parts of TFA. I’d go as far as to say that mailing lists are mostly incompatible with chat-like usage patterns. It’s a feature, not a bug. Chat programs and protocols like IRC have existed almost as long as mailing lists, but were never a replacement for them.

I think one of the reasons is that mailing list usage expects/imposes some level of reflection time and editing between sending a new reply. Imagine if every time someone hit enter in slack/teams/discord a new email showed up in a thread somewhere in someone's mail reader.

it seems to have a plugin for federation, but I'm not sure how federation works for forums