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@p @Godsend @DiamondMind @GhostOfMoshe @SilverDeth @thebitchisback @bonifartius @freemayonnaise @graf @takao

I was there. I’m still there. Not Usenet, but I’m on technical mailing lists. They’re still interesting.

consider the difference in how that email list works, though, and you’ll see what I’m saying:

you subscribe to an email list, you receive reflected emails from all participants who send to it and decide what to do with them

the mailing-list moderators have exactly one option for list management: they can remove someone from the list, at which point they will no longer receive new emails, nor can they send any further emails to the list…. however, their old emails are not sucked back out of everybody’s inboxes, nor are they prevented from contacting other people directly, nor are those people prevented from directly contacting them

nothing in the design of Fediverse even approximates that dynamic, except in the absolute limiting case, where each person runs their own server