Should there be an "alt.cypherpunks" type of newsgroup instead of this mailing list? (Or, to use my punchline at the end: Let the market decide.) At 10:26 AM 9/16/95, aba@atlas.ex.ac.uk wrote:
One thing I have been thinking would be nice would be a USENET newsgroup, as mailing lists are a step away from easy access which some people never make. It makes it less easy to browse and see what it's about, interacting with majordomo software might seem very intuitive to most members, but not all will be so comfortable signing up their mailbox (which they possibly pay for per K), and may indeed lack the expertise required to do the job. There are serveral archives of cpunks, but these don't tend to be as well known as newsgroups. More people might come across cypherpunks ideas, and the technology for remailers, disk encryptors, discussions of nym servers, steganorgraphy, IPSEC, etc if they were in a newsgroup, perhaps even within the comp, soc, or sci hierarchies.
It would be easy to create "alt.cypherpunks." I've been expecting to see it happen for the last 3 years. It could still happen. In fact, there's been talk of doing it (sorry for the passive "there has been talk," but I'll let the folks talking about doing it do the talking about it here). "Alt" groups are easy to create. (Newcomers to the list might like to know that one of our founding memmbers, John Gilmore, created the "alt.*" option some years back, with "alt.drugs" I think it was.) However, how many _newsgroups_ do any of you know of that have anywhere near the sense of cohesion and "community" that our mailing list has? Newsgroups encourage wider exposure to ideas, but also make "hit-and-run" disruptions more likely. The speed bump of having to figure out how to subscribe to a mailing list, and the expectation that one will remain "in the community" for a while, moderates flamish behavior and encourages people to try to learn. Newsgroups encourage very wide browsing, which has some advantages. But also a lack of persistent contributors and a lack of community. Mailing lists _tend_ to have much tighter feedback loops, where most messages are read by most members, or at least are glanced at. Newsgroups have a different character, and topics get repeated even more often. Interestingly, several crypto folks I know have said they have stopped seriously using the "sci.crypt" and "talk.politics.crypto" newsgroups and are concentrating on smaller mailing lists of co-workers and committee members(task forces, working groups, etc.). In some sense, the Cypherpunks list is somewhere in-between a full newsgroup and a small working mailing list. I could go on, but I ask instead that readers do their own investigation. First, are there any newsgroups out there that have the atmosphere we have? (I'm not saying there aren't any, and finding some examples to look at might be instructive...) Second, would the benefits of wider exposure, as "alt.cypherpunks," more than balance out the negative effects mentioned above? Third, is "news reading" software really that much better than "mail reading" software? For me, for example, I use Eudora Pro and can filter all messages by words in the thread name, by author, by mailing list name, etc. And _saving_ messages is the default, unlike newsgroups, where I must explicitly save an article to a file. So, for me, I have a very large "Cypherpunks archives," whereas I don't have a large "talk.polititics.crypto" archive (partly because of the lack of community there....). This brings up a final point, with more than 10,000 newsgroups, including nearly a dozen devoted to crypto, PGP, security, and anonymity, aren't there already enough? A likely effect of "alt.cypherpunks" is this: Subject: Re: ITARs Worked for Less than One Day Date: Sun, 10 Sep 1995 00:18:38 GMT From: david@sternlight.com (David Sternlight) Organization: DSI/USCRPAC Newsgroups: sci.crypt, alt.security.pgp, talk.politics.crypto, alt.cypherpunks That is, "alt.cypherpunks" just gets added to the cc: list of a lot of posts. But, if anyone wants it, create it. Then people can vote with their feet. Both the list and the newsgroup can co-exist, and if the newsgroup "wins," the list can be dropped. --Tim May ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^756839 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders are just speed bumps on the information superhighway."