Re: Young people peering

On 5/14/24 12:02, Russ Allbery wrote:

When I worked at Stanford, I set up fairly extensive local newsgroups to capture all sorts of reports and user requests that started out as email.  I really liked that system, and some of my co-workers did as well, but I think it mostly or entirely went away after I left.

I can't say as I'm surprised.
I've long viewed Usenet / NNTP as an early form of publish / subscribe information destination.
If I was in a position to do so, I'd have various things publish current status as articles to newsgroups specifically for the devices.  Then consumers could subscribe to the newsgroups (as a proxy for the devices) they are interested in.
I think this could be especially germane if there was a way to expire / cancel / supersede so that the current status was easily reference.  I /think/ there is some capability to do exactly this in NNTP.  It's just that this capability isn't used in Usenet in general, for -- hopefully -- obvious security implications.

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.
IMHO a web mail client is a poor excuse for an email client.

... 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.
Now people will probably liken a Usent article to a posting on some social media site.  Go there, read it there, and comment there.

When I was at an email-heavy job (I'm thankfully not any more), I will say that I found a good mobile email client to be exceptionally good at its job, good enough that I never bothered to set up Gnus for work email (which is what I usually use to let me treat email as if it's Usenet).

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.

Being able to triage email on the train is incredibly useful and I'm dubious there's a mobile news client with the same feature set (although I admit I have not done a ton of research).

Experiencing a good, rather than bad, email client is an eye opener. Experiencing that on mobile is awe inspiring.
No, I don't consider what I'm currently using to be good.  At best it's the least evil.
--
Grant. . . .