Thursday, December 26, 2019
Email lists going down the memory hole
Once upon a time, email was my primary application, as well as netnews. It was the primary internet application for everybody! not just me. And thus, for decades now, various folk have attempted to supplant or replace it. Few under thirty have ever seen a "Real" email client, or used email to effectively manage their workflow. Everywhere I've been lately (Portugal, Central America) whatsapp dominates....
Once upon a time, gmane indexed mailing lists, and in turn, google indexed those. Of late, especially since gmane died, core reference material to these ongoing conversations has seemingly vanished from the internet. The mailing list is the refuge of puzzled old farts that wonder where the conversation went.
The main lists I interact on, almost never show up in a google query, despite 9 years of history, discussion, theory and code, about fixing the bufferbloat problem, shared by some of the best in the business. I doubt my lists have seen more than 3 new subscribers a year since 2015.
Hell, recently, the internet history mailing list dropped off the net... the https slash slash www.postel.org/internet-history/index.html link is no longer "secure" - and I'm afraid to put a direct link to it in this post because then I might get downgraded by a search engine somewhere...
Should I mourn the death of email and the mailing list? Yes! Can I do anything to save them? I don't know. Just because I don't like handing control of the conversation to disquis or to facebook, etc, doesn't mean anything. I do know that since g+ died, a lot of my regular "web" correspondents "vanished" into diaspora, and maybe I should check out if the grass is greener there.
Once upon a time, gmane indexed mailing lists, and in turn, google indexed those. Of late, especially since gmane died, core reference material to these ongoing conversations has seemingly vanished from the internet. The mailing list is the refuge of puzzled old farts that wonder where the conversation went.
The main lists I interact on, almost never show up in a google query, despite 9 years of history, discussion, theory and code, about fixing the bufferbloat problem, shared by some of the best in the business. I doubt my lists have seen more than 3 new subscribers a year since 2015.
Hell, recently, the internet history mailing list dropped off the net... the https slash slash www.postel.org/internet-history/index.html link is no longer "secure" - and I'm afraid to put a direct link to it in this post because then I might get downgraded by a search engine somewhere...
Should I mourn the death of email and the mailing list? Yes! Can I do anything to save them? I don't know. Just because I don't like handing control of the conversation to disquis or to facebook, etc, doesn't mean anything. I do know that since g+ died, a lot of my regular "web" correspondents "vanished" into diaspora, and maybe I should check out if the grass is greener there.
