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

From: William Casarin <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 9 Nov 2023 13:03:12 +0900

On Tue, Nov 07, 2023 at 06:14:23PM +0000, Andrew Chow via bitcoin-dev wrote:
>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.

email-like functionality over nostr isn't really explored yet, but it is
something I'm interesting in. So I agree nostr isn't a suitable email
replacement *yet*.

>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.

My idea was to have a mailing list relay, the only thing missing is To:
and Cc: tags on notes so that the relay can reject notes not destined
for the mailing list

>How would people "subscribe"? How would archives be searched or
>otherwise be available to people who are not on nostr?

You would subscribe by connecting to the relay and pulling down the
notes. your client could cache notes and only pull new ones.

>How do you distinguish and filter between legitimate dev posts
>intended for discussion and random crap and shitposting as shows up on
>social media?

You would need to have metadata on the note that specifies that the note
is destined for that specific mailing list relay (To, Cc, etc). Then the
client sending the message can send it to that specific relay during
note composition. Again, this is different than then current model that
exists with social networking clients designed for blasting your note to
as many people as possible.

>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.

Subject lines already exist in nostr and are a part of some email-like
clients like https://github.com/unclebob/more-speech . it's just a tag
like every other piece of metadata.

>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.

I definitely prefer email at the moment as well, but it is also a pain
in the ass to run email infra. As someone who runs both email servers
and nostr relays I can say nostr is much more pleasant.

So yeah, it's a bit too early for a nostr replacement, but it's
definitely possible, and you get proper cryptographic identities and
schnorr signed notes which is a bonus. For dealing with spam you could
have a sat entrance fee via lightning. I will start looking into this!

Cheers,

	Will