Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] Future of the bitcoin-dev mailing list

From: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 08 Nov 2023 10:05:34 +0100

On 2023-11-07 17:12, Andrew Chow via bitcoin-dev wrote:

> I would prefer that we continue to have a mailing list where email is a
> functional and first class user interface. So that would be to migrate
> to groups.io or Google Groups. I think Google Groups is probably the
> better choice of the two.

+1 to migrating to a different email service.  That seems like the most 
straightforward solution.

On 2023-11-08 04:56, Anthony Towns via bitcoin-dev wrote:

> delvingbitcoin.org is something I setup

Cool, thanks!  It's great to have more channels of discussion.  Same 
with IRC etc.

Cheers,
-Yancy

> Andrew Chow
> 
> On 11/07/2023 10:37 AM, Bryan Bishop via bitcoin-dev wrote:
> 
>> Hello,
>> 
>> We would like to request community feedback and proposals on the 
>> future
>> of the mailing list.
>> 
>> Our current mailing list host, Linux Foundation, has indicated for 
>> years
>> that they have wanted to stop hosting mailing lists, which would mean
>> the bitcoin-dev mailing list would need to move somewhere else. We
>> temporarily avoided that, but recently LF has informed a moderator 
>> that
>> they will cease hosting any mailing lists later this year.
>> 
>> In this email, we will go over some of the history, options, and 
>> invite
>> discussion ahead of the cutoff. We have some ideas but want to solicit
>> feedback and proposals.
>> 
>> Background
>> ==========
>> 
>> The bitcoin-dev mailing list was originally hosted on Sourceforge.net.
>> The bitcoin development mailing list has been a source of proposals,
>> analysis, and developer discussion for many years in the bitcoin
>> community, with many thousands of participants. Later, the mailing 
>> list
>> was migrated to the Linux Foundation, and after that OSUOSL began to 
>> help.
>> 
>> Linux Foundation first asked us to move the mailing list in 2017. They
>> internally attempted to migrate all LF mailing lists from mailman2 to
>> mailman3, but ultimately gave up. There were reports of scalability
>> issues with mailman3 for large email communities. Ours definitely
>> qualifies as.. large.
>> 
>> 2019 migration plan: LF was to turn off mailman and all lists would
>> migrate to the paid service provider groups.io <http://groups.io>. 
>> Back
>> then we were given accounts to try the groups.io <http://groups.io>
>> interface and administration features. Apparently we were not the only
>> dev community who resisted change. To our surprise LF gave us several
>> years of reprieve by instead handing the subdomain and server-side 
>> data
>> to the non-profit OSUOSL lab who instead operated mailman2 for the 
>> past
>> ~4 years.
>> 
>> OSUOSL has for decades been well known for providing server
>> infrastructure for Linux and Open Source development so they were a 
>> good
>> fit. This however became an added maintenance burden for the small
>> non-profit with limited resources. Several members of the Bitcoin dev
>> community contributed funding to the lab in support of their Open 
>> Source
>> development infrastructure goals. But throwing money at the problem
>> isn't going to fix the ongoing maintenance burden created by 
>> antiquated
>> limitations of mailman2.
>> 
>> Permalinks
>> ==========
>> 
>> Linux Foundation has either offered or agreed to maintain archive
>> permalinks so that content of historic importance is not lost.
>> Fortunately for us while lists.linuxfoundation.org
>> <http://lists.linuxfoundation.org> mailman will go down, they have
>> agreed the read-only pipermail archives will remain online. So all old
>> URLs will continue to remain valid. However, the moderators strongly
>> advise that the community supplements with public-inbox instances to
>> have canonical archive urls that are separate from any particular 
>> email
>> software host.
>> 
>> Public-Inbox
>> ============
>> 
>> https://public-inbox.org/README.html 
>> <https://public-inbox.org/README.html>
>> 
>> "Public Inbox" decentralized archiving - no matter what mailing list
>> server solution is used, anyone can use git to maintain their own
>> mailing list archive and make it available to read on the web.
>> 
>> Public Inbox is a tool that you can run yourself. You can transform 
>> your
>> mbox file and it makes it browsable and viewable online. It commits
>> every post to a git repository. It's kind of like a decentralized mail
>> archiving tool. Anyone can publish the mail archive to any web server
>> they wish.
>> 
>> We should try to have one or more canonical archives that are served
>> using public-inbox. But it doesn't matter if these are lost because
>> anyone else can archive the mailing list in the same way and 
>> re-publish
>> the archives.
>> 
>> These git commits can also be stamped using opentimestamps, inserting
>> their hashes into the bitcoin blockchain.
>> 
>> LKML mailing list readers often use public-inbox's web interface, and
>> they use the reply-to headers to populate their mail client and reply 
>> to
>> threads of interest. This allows their reply to be properly threaded
>> even if they were not a previous subscriber to that mailing list to
>> receive the headers.
>> 
>> public-inbox makes it so that it doesn't really matter where the list 
>> is
>> hosted, as pertaining to reading the mailing list. There is still a
>> disruption if the mailing list goes away, but the archives live on and
>> then people can post elsewhere. The archive gets disconnected from the
>> mailing list host in terms of posting. We could have a few canonical
>> URLs for the hosts, separate from the mailing list server.
>> 
>> mailman problems
>> ================
>> 
>> Over the years we have identified a number of problems with mailman2
>> especially as it pertains to content moderation. There are presently a
>> handful of different moderators, but mailman2 only has a single 
>> password
>> for logging into the email management interface. There are no 
>> moderator
>> audit logs to see which user (there is no concept of different users)
>> acted on an email. There is no way to mark an email as being
>> investigated by one or more of the moderators. Sometimes, while
>> investigating the veracity of an email, another moderator would come 
>> in
>> and approve a suspect email by accident.
>> 
>> Anti spam has been an issue for the moderators. It's relentless. 
>> Without
>> access to the underlying server, it has been difficult to fight spam.
>> There is some support for filters in mailman2 but it's not great.
>> 
>> 100% active moderation and approval of every email is unsustainable 
>> for
>> volunteer moderators. A system that requires moderation is a heavy
>> burden on the moderators and it slows down overall communication and
>> productivity. There's lots of problems with this. Also, moderators can
>> be blamed when they are merely slow while they are not actually 
>> censoring.
>> 
>> Rejection emails can optionally be sent to
>> [email-masked]
>> <mailto:[email-masked]> but this is an option
>> that a moderator has to remember to type in each time.
>> 
>> Not to mention numerous bugs and vulnerabilities that have accumulated
>> over the years for relatively unmaintained software. (Not disclosed 
>> here)
>> 
>> Requirements and considerations
>> ===============================
>> 
>> Looking towards the future, there are a number of properties that seem
>> to be important for the bitcoin-dev mailing list community. First, it 
>> is
>> important that backups of the entire archive should be easy for the
>> public to copy or verify so that the system can be brought up 
>> elsewhere
>> if necessary.
>> 
>> Second, there seems to be demand for both an email threading interface
>> (using mailing list software) as well as web-accessible interfaces 
>> (such
>> as forum software). There seems to be very few options that cater to
>> both email and web. Often, in forum software, email support is limited
>> to email notifications and there is limited if any support for email
>> user participation.
>> 
>> Third, there should be better support for moderator tools and 
>> management
>> of the mailing list. See above for complaints about problems with the
>> mailman2 system.
>> 
>> Burdens of running your own mailing list and email server
>> =========================================================
>> 
>> If you have never operated your own MTA you have no idea how difficult
>> it is to keep secure and functional in the face of numerous challenges
>> to deliverability. Anti-spam filtering is essential to prevent
>> forwarding spam. The moment you forward even a single spam message you
>> run the risk of the server IP address being added to blacklists.
>> 
>> The problem of spam filtering is so bad that most IP addresses are
>> presumed guilty even if they have no prior spam history, such as if
>> their network or subnetwork had spam issues in the past.
>> 
>> Even if you put unlimited time into managing your own email server,
>> other people may not accept your email. Or you make one mistake, and
>> then you get into permanent blacklists and it's hard to remove. The 
>> spam
>> problem is so bad that most IPs are automatically on a
>> guilty-until-proven-innocent blacklist.
>> 
>> Often there is nothing you can do to get server IP addresses removed
>> from spam blacklists or from "bad reputation" lists.
>> 
>> Ironically, hashcash-style proof-of-work stamps to prevent spam are an
>> appealing solution but not widely used in this community. Or anywhere.
>> 
>> Infinite rejection or forwarding loops happen. They often need to be
>> detected through vigilance and require manual sysadmin intervention to
>> solve.
>> 
>> Bitcoin's dev lists being hosted alongside other Open Source projects
>> was previously protective. If that mailing list server became
>> blacklisted there were a lot of other people who would notice and
>> complain. If we run a Bitcoin-specific mail server we are on our own.
>> 100% of the administrative burden falls upon our own people. There is
>> also nothing we can do if some unknown admin decides they don't like 
>> us.
>> 
>> Options
>> =======
>> 
>> Web forums are an interesting option, but often don't have good email
>> user integration. At most you can usually hope for email notifications
>> and an ability to reply by email. It changes the model of the 
>> community
>> from push (email) to pull (logging into a forum to read). RSS feeds 
>> can
>> help a little bit.
>> 
>> Many other projects have moved from mailing lists to forums (eg
>> https://discuss.python.org/ <https://discuss.python.org/> - see
>> https://lwn.net/Articles/901744/ <https://lwn.net/Articles/901744/> ; 
>> or
>> https://ethresear.ch/ <https://ethresear.ch/>), which seem easier to
>> maintain and moderate, and can have lots of advanced features beyond
>> plaintext, maybe-threading and maybe-HTML-markup.
>> 
>> Who would host the forum? Would there be agreement around which forum
>> software to use or which forum host? What about bitcointalk.org
>> <http://bitcointalk.org> or delvingbitcoin.org
>> <http://delvingbitcoin.org>? There are many options available. Maybe
>> what we actually want isn't so much a discussion forum, as an 'arxiv 
>> of
>> our own' where anons can post BIP drafts and the like?
>> 
>> Given the problems with mailman2, and the decline of email communities
>> in general, it seems that moving to mailman3 would not be a viable
>> long-term option. This leaves us with Google Groups or groups.io
>> <http://groups.io> as two remaining options.
>> 
>> groups.io <http://groups.io> is an interesting option: they are a paid
>> service that implements email communities along with online web forum
>> support. However, their public changelog indicates it has been a few
>> years since their last public change. They might be a smaller company
>> and it is unclear how long they will be around or if this would be the
>> right fit for hosting sometimes contentious bitcoin development
>> discussions...
>> 
>> Google Groups is another interesting option, and comes with different
>> tradeoffs. It's the lowest effort to maintain option, and has both an
>> email interface and web forum interface. Users can choose which mode
>> they want to interact with.
>> 
>> For the Google Groups web interface, you can use it with a non-gmail
>> account, but you must create a Google Account which is free to do. it
>> does not require any personal information to do so. This also allows 
>> you
>> to add 2FA. Non-gmail non-google users are able to subscribe and post
>> email from their non-gmail non-google email accounts. Tor seems to 
>> work
>> for the web interface.
>> 
>> Will Google shut it down, will they cut us off, will they shut down
>> non-google users? The same problem exists with other third-party 
>> hosts.
>> 
>> The moderation capabilities for Google Groups and groups.io
>> <http://groups.io> seem to be comparable. It seems more likely that
>> Google Groups will be able to handle email delivery issues far better
>> than a small resource-constrained operation like groups.io
>> <http://groups.io>. ((During feedback for this draft, luke-jr 
>> indicates
>> that Google Workspaces has been known to use blacklisted IPs for
>> business email!))
>> 
>> On the other hand, groups.io <http://groups.io> is a paid service and
>> you get what you pay for... hopefully?
>> 
>> Finally, another option is to do literally nothing. It's less work
>> overall. Users can switch to forums or other websites, or private
>> one-on-one communication. It would remove a point of 
>> semi-centralization
>> from the bitcoin ecosystem. It would hasten ossification, but on the
>> other hand it would hasten ossification and this could be a negative
>> too. Moderators would be less of a target.
>> 
>> Unfortunately, by doing nothing, there would be no more widely used
>> group email communication system between bitcoin developers. 
>> Developers
>> become less coordinated, mayhem and chaos as people go to different
>> communication platforms, a divided community is more vulnerable, etc.
>> BIP1 and BIP2 would need to be revised for other venues.
>> 
>> The main categories of what to move to are: web forums, mailing lists,
>> and hybrids of those two options. Most everything is either 
>> self-hosted
>> or you pay someone else to host it. It's kind of the same problem
>> though. It largely depends on how good is the software and 
>> unfortunately
>> running your own MTA that forwards mail is not a good option.
>> 
>> Going forward
>> ===========
>> 
>> We'd like to invite feedback and proposals from the community, and see
>> what options are available. One potential option is a migration to
>> Google Groups, but we're open to ideas at this point. We apologize for
>> any inconvenience this disruption has caused.
>> 
>> Bitcoin-dev mailing list moderation team
>> 
>> Bryan Bishop
>> Ruben Somsen
>> Warren Togami
>> various others.
>> 
>> --
>> - Bryan
>> https://twitter.com/kanzure <https://twitter.com/kanzure>
> 
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