Mailing Lists
I have to say, I think mailing lists are very cool. In the last couple of weeks, I set up the Mailman mailing list server and integrated it into my Postfix/Dovecot mail server and I’ve had some fun playing around with it from a technical point of view. I was rather pleased with myself for working out how to integrate it without resorting to a “cookbook” howto online.
I love them because they deliver messages straight to my inbox. It’s actually a very natural way for me to interact online, via email, and I enjoy the way various lists have their own culture and netiquette and even established rule sets. I know that this is true of discussion boards and forums as well, which is great.
Mailing lists follow a distributed networking model, but are flexible enough to be used in various ways. I’ve been on a mailing list used as an instruction delivery channel for SEO training: communication was primarily one way, but there was a great opportunity to hear specific input from other students along with the teacher’s response. The list worked very well because the rules for communicating were very clear and the tutor enforced them skilfully.
Plenty of mailing lists are purely one way communication: people subscribe to such lists in order to receive information about a product, service or event. These aren’t terribly interesting, to be frank: just an efficient means of communication.
I believe a great potential for community development exists with mailing lists. I often look for answers to questions and find them in mailing list archives that have been indexed by Google. They appear to be a great way to ask for and to give assistance to people with similar interests. At least, this occurs in an environment that suits me: from the privacy of my inbox.
I like the fact that lists can be moderated and that subscribers can choose to receive emails to the list straight away or in digest mode. I signed up to the Internet Studies Yahoo Group mailing list, and I receive the messages for that in digest form, which allows me to efficiently allocate time each day to reviewing messages and making posts.
In the past, I’ve been a member of a number of strong online discussion board communities. The most enjoyable was the Puppy Linux community, where I spent many hours with other enthusiasts learning and teaching. I was also a member of the Poetry Free For All, PFFA, which is a poetry workshop. Sadly, I don’t much time these days for either poetry or hacking, so I haven’t participated for ages.
For me, the greatest advantage of mailing lists is convenience: the messages come to you, and you are in control of how you receive those messages. The online discussion board requires a login and manually checking for new messages (even if these are highlighted for you by the software). In some cases, you can set your preferences to receive an email message when someone replies to a post of yours, so there are some conveniences.
Discussion boards are more centralised: people have to go to the host website in order to participate, making them like meeting places.
In my experience, mailing lists are great for one-way communication, teaching applications and for communities that operate through asking questions and giving answers. Discussion boards are more personal, with links to profiles and so on, but they can be quite cumbersome. These are great for people with a general commom interest and where subclassification of topics can facilitate stronger community subsections.