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Path: ...!eternal-september.org!feeder3.eternal-september.org!newsfeed.xs3.de!nntp-feed.chiark.greenend.org.uk!ewrotcd!news.eyrie.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Russ Allbery <eagle@eyrie.org> Newsgroups: news.software.nntp Subject: Re: Young people peering Date: Tue, 14 May 2024 17:55:13 -0700 Organization: The Eyrie Message-ID: <87v83fnbbi.fsf@hope.eyrie.org> References: <uvgh5a$1d8l$10@gallifrey.nk.ca> <uvmi06$13lru$1@dont-email.me> <uvmqk6$2cgt$8@gallifrey.nk.ca> <ddbb045d7ec304cb6220e93b1193901b@www.novabbs.org> <uvodbh$1jboj$1@dont-email.me> <uvoqg6$2og3$2@gallifrey.nk.ca> <be5bc4c206449a1c80ad035cbee5ab5d$1@sybershock.com> <6643880e$1$2422112$882e4bbb@reader.netnews.com> <87bk58min5.fsf@hope.eyrie.org> <v20o6n$qdj$2@tncsrv09.home.tnetconsulting.net> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain Injection-Info: hope.eyrie.org; logging-data="12696"; mail-complaints-to="news@eyrie.org" User-Agent: Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Cancel-Lock: sha1:evzJNQYcWB82QAxCCbz66RV63zc= Bytes: 6358 Lines: 100 Grant Taylor <gtaylor@tnetconsulting.net> writes: > On 5/14/24 12:02, Russ Allbery wrote: >> Part of the problem these days is that news clients are a lot rarer >> than mail clients ... > I'd agree with and raise you that fat mail clients aren't nearly as > popular as they once were. Except on the phone. I suppose you could use webmail from a phone, but I don't think people do nearly as much. > IMHO a web mail client is a poor excuse for an email client. It depends very much on what you want to do with it. At my last job, I just used the Gmail web client (and various mobile clients) the whole time I worked there for all work mail (which was very high-volume). It worked great. And I'm a fairly technically sophisticated user who uses probably the most sophisticated fat mail client (apart from HTML rendering) currently available. Lots of people just use Gmail's web client. It's fine. It even has a lot of the capabilities that you would expect in a fat client, such as very rich filtering, although its filtering syntax is pretty weird. And so many other people use the Gmail web client that messages generally look good in the Gmail web client, which sometimes matters. It's bad at sending the sort of messages that we prefer on Usenet, but no one really expects that at organizations that use Gmail and they all send messages in a way that works well on Gmail (at least in my experience). It's different, and it has various tradeoffs, but work got done just fine. One of the things that does is push document smithing and extensive comments *out* of email and into a documentation collaboration platform of one form or another, and honestly, that's a lot better anyway. >> ... don't work in all the ways that people expect mail to work (on the >> phone, in particular). > I question that. > Mostly because I think people are largely ignorant of many aspects of > communications. Sure, and in fact they *do not want to know* about many aspects of communications because there are more things in this world than anyone has time to learn in a lifetime, and they have lives and hobbies and other shit that they want to do with their time. What they know are the things they want to do with their email, and that includes doing a lot of it on their phone. > I think that a good email client is a very valuable thing. As indicated > above, web based email clients aren't good by any stretch of the > imagination. None of this stuff is "good" or "bad" in some uniform absolute way. It all depends on what you want to do with it. I still use a web-based email client for work (a considerably worse one than Gmail's), because I mostly don't use email for my job at all, I read work email about once a week, and the only task that I need to do in it is go through and skim and delete a bunch of messages and send an email maybe once a month. Is that email ugly HTML top-posted crap? Yes, it is. I cannot be bothered to do anything else given how little I use it and how much I dislike setting up IMAP, and no one cares. I really like my rich email client, but it's just not worth the afternoon it would take to set it up to talk to my work email server (and all the drawbacks of comingling work email with personal email, or an even more complicated project of setting up multiple clients). Not having to set up a client is a huge benefit for me that turns out to matter more to me than the web UI. Which is, let me be clear, utterly godawful, but I only use it once a week and I only use like four buttons in the UI, so who cares. Anyway, there are a whole host of issues with Usenet, but one of them is that it's just not very accessible to the average person because technology has moved on and there isn't a huge demand or developer base to write nice mobile clients and zero-install clients and to think really hard about optimizing workflows. And that's fine! Not every technology has to be at the middle of the daily lives of a mass audience, and in fact it can be very uncomfortable to be in that position. Incidentally, if you want blocks of text to look good on the phone, you pretty much have to use one of the other things Usenet folks love to hate: HTML messages. The way you get all the text flowing to work properly with wildly different screen sizes is that you outsource all that work to an HTML rendering engine, which is an obscenely complex piece of software that you then don't have to write. Not saying that Usenet should use HTML! I kind of like that it doesn't because I'm an old fossil. But there are reasons for these technology choices, and they all interact. Is HTML the best way to do this in theory? Absolutely not! It has tons of problems! But it's already there, everyone knows how to use it, most of email is in HTML these days anyway, and there are millions of people and entire industries devoted to making HTML look good. It's very, very hard for a theoretically better alternative to compete with that. -- Russ Allbery (eagle@eyrie.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> Please post questions rather than mailing me directly. <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/faqs/questions.html> explains why.