On Tue, Oct 29, 2019 at 12:13:41AM +0100, marc wrote: > Lionel wrote: >>>> I know that I'm old-fashioned in this respect, but I think for >>>> online discussions no better system than Usenet has been invented, >>>> but mailing lists are the next best options.
>>> Full ACK. >> Have you lived the heydays of Fidonet? > I am going to assume that Lionel's comment was meant snarkily. No, it wasn't. As I remember things, Fidonet echomail & netmail was more "power user"-friendly than Usenet/NNTP. I admit I now cannot anymore clearly articulate why, and my memory of details is now hazy, but I distinctly remember being frustrated a half-life ago with some Usenet (or was it the then-available user agents?) technical limitations compared to my Fidonet setup (which included a point address). One point I remember is that one didn't have to worry about the BBS' post retention policy, the way one has/had with Usenet/NNTP. But it could not have been the only point. I have a vague memory that the Fidonet echomail/netmail bundle allowed one to get a message by both personal mail (netmail) and also see in the public discussion (echomail), while the two were integrated; reading it in one did mark it read in the other; maybe even showed it in context. Usenet falls back to email for personal messages, and there it becomes two independent messages, possibly duplicated. Or maybe that was just a feature of the user agent I was using for echomail & netmail, that made it "feel" like personal mail by highlighting (sub?)threads below my own posts and/or organising them into a "virtual personal mailbox". I honestly don't remember exactly. In this, mailing lists are more integrated than the Usenet/email bundle. The way one gets personal copies (personal CCs) is the same as the way one gets ML posts; although it is not universally supported (and didn't make into official RFCs...), there is a way to request these personal copies, the Mail-Followup-To header, which is rather widely supported in the unix clone hacker / floss MUAs at least. But I don't know any MUA that will link both copies and handle them in an integrated way. I do remember I had in my Fidonet echomail setup a script that presorted some messages "on top" in the feed and then used the fact that my user agent's sort was stable to finish up the sort (that was before I had any instruction on how to actually write a sort algorithm... I just hunted for messages I wanted, writing a kind of finite state automaton by hand, and moved them to the top). -- Lionel _______________________________________________ Discussion mailing list Discussion@lists.fsfe.org https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion This mailing list is covered by the FSFE's Code of Conduct. All participants are kindly asked to be excellent to each other: https://fsfe.org/about/codeofconduct
