<i>This isn’t to say that for-profit companies are bad, it’s just that if they can make money by tracking your behavior and serving you ads, then that will take precedence over giving your project a good user experience.</i><p>This strikes me as hitting the nail on the head!
EDIT: Zed just addressed this with some basic plans: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=974744" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=974744</a><p>Overall it looks nice. The most interesting/controversial bit to me is the following (taken from librelist.com):<p><i>Nobody Can Be Taken Off<p>The “libre” in the name means freedom for everyone to discuss their opinions, so nobody will have the right to boot you off or enforce arbitrary “list Nazi” rules simply because you disagree with them.<p>That of course doesn’t mean you should act like a jerk, but the librelist.com philosophy is that healthy communities can survive and need “trolls”.</i>
I created a Hacker News list so we can test it out. hackernews@librelist.com will let you see it.<p>Glad he's taking on the neglected lists @ google & yahoo.
<i>Many systems allow a small minority to tyrannically control the group, applying censorship where nobody actually wants it.</i><p>Many systems <i>may</i> allow this behavior, but that doesn't mean it actually happens. At least I've never personally encountered it on a mailing list. Is it really that big a problem?<p>On the other hand, maybe the current state of comp.lang.lisp is a good example of what a mailing list with no moderation might look like. There are still good conversations, but there is so much spam and trolling that I don't bother reading it anymore -- it took too much work to sift through all the junk. Even worse, the trolls create an environment that is not exactly inviting to new users.
<i>They make you log in just to see archives, which ruins any promotional and educational value your archives have.</i><p>That's not exactly true. At Yahoo, I believe this is up to the list owner. (I know my most active list there allows viewing of archives without logging in.)<p>At Google, it's weirder: if you're <i>not logged into Google at all</i>, you can often view the archives without being prompted for a login. But if you are logged into Google elsewhere, they demand you either reconfirm your login with Groups, or logout entirely, before allowing you to view to the archives.<p>(That's still a problem -- enough of an annoyance in fact that I wouldn't consider hosting any more groups there until it's fixed. But it seems mainly an eccentricity of their cross-site login policies, and does still offer a route to non-logged-in viewing.)
I wanted to use it, but then came across this:<p>>You also subscribe to a list by simply sending your first message to list@librelist.com. It will then confirm you and send your original email on to the list. No special subscribe addresses, difficult workflows, or endless help references. Just send an email.<p>Totally unacceptable IMHO, and unlike how any other mailing list functionality works. If you send a message to the list, it should arrive there, without confirmation from you, and you shouldn't be subscribed unless you explicitly want that. Otherwise how can you participate in a conversation on the mailinglist without subscribing or allow cross-mailinglist posts?
<i>Nothing to allow tyranny of the minority or majority. It’s all about free speech and open communication.
However, this is balanced with the above spam marking, and potentially a “troll rating” that’s similar to a spam rating.</i><p>How do you reconcile these two when an unpopular opinion can be marginalized as troll or spam?
Folks, if you're looking for an alternative that's run by a non-profit and completely open source, please check out:<p><a href="http://www.coactivate.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.coactivate.org/</a>
If it works out to be a friendly list interface with a <i>group</i> feeling, this would be an absolute winner project.<p>As a year of graduates we use a yahoogroups list since 2000, and we never changed it. Yahoogroups is currently running on 1995 technology, and google groups get spammed, let alone the web pages look like a pharmacy store. Also both lack the "we are a group" feeling.<p>So yes, since we're looking for a better interface and couldn't find one hitting 2010, if done properly this would be a definite winner.
Just curious, do most people here use the email client as the primary interface for the group sites?<p>I personally use the web interface for busy listings just to keep things separate from my actual email, and email client for only very low-volume listings. Am I missing out on something?
This is off topic, but are there any mailist that archive nothing, anonymize every poster's ID except spam or uninvited, delete unnecessary headers, and do not log anything?
Great idea. I've started to smell the "funk" recently around Google Groups; Zed pinned down exactly what it was. This will be a very interesting project moving forward.