"alt.cypherpunks" Newsgroup vs. Mailing List?

[tcmay@got.net (Timothy C. May)]

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."