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

From: Andrew Chow <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 07 Nov 2023 18:14:23 +0000

Hi Dan,

I don't think nostr would be a suitable replacement for the mailing 
list, although this opinion is biased by the fact that I do not use 
nostr and find it to be uninteresting.

 From my limited understanding of how nostr works, it's not clear to me 
how a distributed system that uses message broadcast would work in the 
same way as a mailing list. How would people "subscribe"? How would 
archives be searched or otherwise be available to people who are not on 
nostr? How do you distinguish and filter between legitimate dev posts 
intended for discussion and random crap and shitposting as shows up on 
social media?

I also don't think that long form text on nostr (or any similar 
platform) can sufficiently replace email. None of these things seem to 
contain a way to have a separate subject line as email does. Subjects 
are immensely important for me as it provides a quick and easy way to 
filter out things I don't care about reading. I don't want to have read 
something in before I can decide that I don't care about reading it.

In general, I strongly prefer email, or a platform that has email as a 
first class user interface, over platforms such as nostr, matrix, or web 
forums. Email is universal - everyone has one and everyone knows how it 
works. It dramatically lowers the barrier of entry. Having to make an 
account somewhere or download some specific client in order to 
participate will simply result in only the most dedicated participating. 
Development in open source must be an open process and the barriers to 
entry should be low.

Lastly, IIRC the plan is to shut down the list by the end of this year. 
Any solution that requires custom software and bridges to be created are 
not going to be viable in this time frame.

Andrew

On 11/07/2023 12:03 PM, Ademan via bitcoin-dev wrote:
> Hi Bryan,
> 
> I don't really want my first (and last?) devlist message to be a fairly 
> off-the-cuff post on this topic, but here we go anyway.
> 
> At the risk of sounding like a nostr evangelist (I promise I'm not), I 
> want to suggest nostr as a potential replacement to the mailing list. A 
> decent chunk of software would need to be written, but none of the 
> alternatives seem particularly attractive to me. I particularly dislike 
> the idea of locking into a single siloed forum service like the 
> bitcointalk forums. I realize I may be in the minority of course.
> 
> 
> Nostr enables the ML team to outsource all of its biggest burdens, if it 
> chooses:
> 
> - mail server blocking is N/A to nostr
> 
> - Hosting costs are completely outsourced unless the ML team chooses to 
> host a relay.
> 
> - Archives and web portal access can be similarly outsourced because any 
> nostr archive is self-authenticating.
> 
> - The ML team can also choose to completely outsource moderation, as 
> nostr is (more or less) permissionless by nature.
>    I understand if there is a "blessed" communication system, the ML 
> team would probably prefer to keep it high quality. To that end there 
> are proposals for proof-of-work, and web of trust based blocklists for 
> nostr which are optional for end users. There are other options such as 
> the "moderated communities" proposal which would provide tighter control.
> 
> 
> On the user side, the optional moderation is very attractive, allowing 
> controversial threads to exist and continue, without requiring everyone 
> to see them.
> 
> 
> The following do not currently exist (to my knowledge) and would need to 
> be implemented to meet the ML's requirements:
> 
> - an email gateway to satisfy the bulk of existing ML subscribers
>    This reintroduces issues with mail server blocking of course.
> - a long-form oriented nostr client (current plain text clients could be 
> used in the meantime)
> 
> That admittedly is quite a lot of work, but the second item can be 
> deferred, and the first is not particularly technically challenging, the 
> complications are all on the administration side.
> 
> I expect some reflexive NACKs based on the immaturity of the ecosystem 
> but if we have months to prepare, I believe the core requirements can be 
> solidly satisfied in time, the rest can be developed over time, and I 
> believe the advantages are worth careful consideration.
> 
> Cheers,
> Dan
> 
> On Tue, Nov 7, 2023 at 9:38 AM Bryan Bishop via bitcoin-dev 
> <[email-masked] 
> <mailto:[email-masked]>> 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>
>     _______________________________________________
>     bitcoin-dev mailing list
>     [email-masked]
>     <mailto:[email-masked]>
>     https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev
>     <https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev>
>