Without wanting to continue participating in this topic's interchange of points/arguments, beyond this contribution, I just want to say that I fully agree with what Marc offered in his reply regarding the advantages of older technologies that have become disused, likely because people, being people, are generally lazy and want a SPOC for all things, and only to willing and eager to leave it to others to "take care of my backups", hence the explosive adoption of things like Facebook, Twitter, etc. ... which are not desktop-based, leaving everyone at the mercy of "them" in remote places. Just another facet of what can only be described as a long game-for destroying physical (i.e. neighbourhood) communities of like minds by eventually pulling the plug on those centralized services.
Such blind mass-adoption that I feel can only be characterized as behaviour similar to lemmings or dodos, and we know what happened to the latter! Hence why I keep my email client, and all such personal information, in my own hands at the desktop.
I will still have ALL my resources when the internet fails, as long as a nuke hasn't fried my computer. 🙂
Eric
P.S. This is my email setting for all things. Thank you for understanding.
I Ben and thanks for sharing this feeling, On Mon, Mar 31, 2025 at 08:24:16PM -0400, D. Ben Knoble wrote:thanks for this pointer. so sad those questions arise in stack* as we have a user mailing list.I'm sorry to hear you feel that way; the goal of the StackExchange project was to create a commons of high-quality resources (much like Wikipedia has).Wikipedia came out to fill the gap of collaborative places to edit articles. StackExchange just split communities because previous tools (mailing lists, newsgroups, archives and FAQ) were so much more convenient but in the early years of this millenium, lot of people came to internet with no idea of habits and customs of the technical communities. If it was ignorance, that's very sad. If not, I'll be happy to learn abou arguments that was worth splitting communities.I think the linked examples are good examples of this (though if you visit the home page you will find more sand than pearls these days, at the cost of having helped a great number of people).Did you try newsgroups or mail archives? did you enjoy having your own local workflow with mbox mirrors indexed so you can use mutt of maildir-utils to query them, add copies of posts or threads in your notes and things like that? StackExchange will never reach this level of convenience. Not to mention it's so painful to have a decent conversation through html text ereas. especilly for vim or emacs users. I don't know if StackExchange has an API (I'll be happy to learn about it) so I can include it in my workflow but nevertheless: It's extra work for same result :(Mailing lists are great, and they serve a different purpose for me (cf. the recent extended discussion which might ultimately be boiled down to a high-quality Q&A pair if desired).So how do you set the cursor between mailing lists and StackExchange? We all know the story of questions that looks insignifiant at start being the root of a giant threads with very interesting perspectives. Another point against StackExchange: those kind of threads are so painful to follow in a web page. I couldn't imagine that people could be found of StackExchange so I'm really grateful you shared about it. regards.
