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Comment by tandav | Hacker News Reader

Offtopic. Many teams use mailing lists. That UX always scared me. Is anybody know good tutorials on how to getting started to use this kind of interfaces?

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This is a common refrain, mailing lists do need a lot of instructions at the bottom to make sense — email wasn't made for groups. It's like 'group' SMS, your phone might provide you with a single chat window with all your friends, but what it really is doing is just sending a separate SMS to every one of the recipients.

So you need the 'the manual' attached to every message to make sure people get it right. Looks downright scary sometimes though, especially the prospect of getting swiped at by UNIX greybeards if you do it wrong.

Incidentally, I'm working on a modern version of this whole page in a Reddit-like interface. (https://aether.app) It doesn't solve all of the pains of listserv, but it does help with most, including this one you mentioned.

> email wasn't made for groups

I've always wondered why people didn't use newsgroups instead of mailing lists.

It's likely a combination of bad UX, complex set-up, flaky delivery and having no great interface to manage the groups, memberships, unsubscribes. At least that's the parts we're trying to fix.

"Any sufficiently complicated group communication system contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Usenet."

I wish. Over Microsoft Teams, I would take that any day of the week.

Like I said: "bug-ridden, slow" :)

uhh... including Usenet?

hmm.. Looks like the Morris Corollary won't work on this version.

Google Groups (kinda) solves this problem. On the viewing side, the app is pretty decent, and then you can still receive / reply through email if desired.

A good example group - https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/tiddlywikidev

I wish Apache projects would move more towards something like this.

Google groups is freaking awful!

It actually was decent in the beginning but with each change google broke more features and made the UI far less usable. Not to mention, you force anyone you want in your group to create a google account.

> It's like 'group' SMS, your phone might provide you with a single chat window with all your friends, but what it really is doing is just sending a separate SMS to every one of the recipients.

Most modern phones use MMS Group messaging for groups larger than two. It's more efficient and flexible than SMS.

> Incidentally, I'm working on a modern version of this whole page in a Reddit-like interface. (https://aether.app) It doesn't solve all of the pains of listserv, but it does help with most, including this one you mentioned.

> Try for free for 14 days

No.

A decent email client will display these as a foldable hierarchy, sort of like HN or Reddit's posting interface, just with the body of the posts hidden. With that and full text search it's not so hard. It's the web interfaces that are a bit bulky.

A lot of them will use an algorithm similar to this one https://www.jwz.org/doc/threading.html

Great read! Just noting that the website redirects you to an obscene (but funny) image if this site is the Referer. Disable Referer before clicking or copy the link into the toolbar manually.

Somebody got very salty at the brogrammers over here...

Haha, I completely forgot about that, sorry.

Incidentally, forgetting I had inverted colors for nighttime reading, to me the image looked like a fuzzy peach colored microphone or something similar. Took me a while to figure out how it was obscene! :)

For the most part, you wouldn't use the web interface, which exists mostly for archival/search-engine purposes. You use a plain email program, and get used to hitting "reply all" instead of "reply" (this will have it be "To:" the person you're replying to, and will "Cc:" the mailing list address), you send a regular email to the mailing list address when you want to start a new thread. A halfway decent email program will thread the replies, like HN does.

As an internet old-timer, I initially thought this was a joke, but then realized that it's entirely reasonable for a whole "generation" of internet users to grow up without using mailing lists, and that indeed they may seem scary at first!

I'd recommend finding a mailing list conversation about a topic you know and then hitting all the buttons (there are only a few). you should be able to figure out the links from context

Many email applications can be set to a threaded view to be able to see who replied what to which message: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/message-threading-thund...

You can use Google Groups as either a mailing list or via the web. It's pretty handy and easy to administer if you don't mind outsourcing that to Google.

Each reply has its own page, just click next/prev to follow the thread (or jump using the tree at the bottom)

The interface is email. You know how to use your email client, right?

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