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

From: Antoine Riard <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 13 Nov 2023 02:58:04 +0000

Thanks for the write up and thanks to the bitcoin-dev mailing list
moderation team for their work along the years.

If we can pick up a communication platform where platform moderators /
infra maintainers have low-risk of being targeted by subpoena + gag order
or "injonction administrative" (the equivalent in some civil law systems)
due to lack of moderators discretionary decisions, I think this is a good
outcome.

I don't know of such a communication platform or set of protocols as of
today. Nostr is promising though realistically weak until half a decade of
work is poured in.

Personally, I'll be more present on the Delving Bitcoin forum, though it
sounds more a temporary solution than a long-term ideal. Being hosted by
kernels or other old open-sources project mailing list infra sounds like a
good idea.

Best,
Antoine

Le mar. 7 nov. 2023 à 15:37, Bryan Bishop via bitcoin-dev <
[email-masked]> a écrit :

> 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. Back then we were given
> accounts to try the 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 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
>
> “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] 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/ – see https://lwn.net/Articles/901744/ ; or
> 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 or
> 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 as two remaining
> options.
>
> 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 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. ((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 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
> _______________________________________________
> bitcoin-dev mailing list
> [email-masked]
> https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev
>