Re: Young people peering

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.
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