Idea for experiment: mail to fediverse?
My ambition: having people writing to “username @ domain dot ext” and mail content goes into public, or private, on fediverse “handle @ domain . ext”.
Someone already did it? Pros and cons? Disadvantages are more than benefits?
I heard about a trick called “mail2mastodon” but before doing deeper research I first wanted to understand how the effort is, and if it’s worth.
You can probably do it, but I’m not sure how many users you’d get, as I think that it’d be a less-usable interface.
-
You’d need some way to handle voting; that doesn’t intrinsically show up. Maybe you could do it via expecting users to send specially-structured emails.
-
If by “fediverse” you specifically are talking about the Threadiverse — Lemmy, Piefed, and Mbin — then you’re going to have to also deal with a lack of a way to handle responding to a given comment (unless you intend to forward all comments to all posts that a user has subscribed to to an email address, and then just only let them respond to those).
-
Email isn’t natively encrypted, so if that’s a concern and you want to deal with that, you’d need something like a PGP key that users could register, I guess.
-
Email clients don’t, as far as I know — I haven’t gone looking — natively have Markdown support, so either you need to throw out formatting or have some sort of mapping to and from Markdown to HTML. I don’t know if something like pandoc would be sufficient for that.
-
No native “report” functionality. Maybe you could do it via expecting users to send specially-structured emails.
If what you want is to take advantage of existing native clients, my suggestion is that you’d probably get more mileage out of doing a bidirectional Usenet-to-Threadiverse gateway than an email-to-Threadiverse gateway. That has a much closer mapping in terms of functionality than email. You could do that a lot more efficiently in terms of bandwidth. Your “Usenet group list” would be a set of community@instance name entries, and you map posts to top level messages, and comments to responses to those.
The major downside there is that I don’t think that any Usenet clients have native Markdown support and you still don’t have voting or native reporting functionality.
The only obvious benefit I can think of from either Usenet or email is that there are clients for both that support offline functionality, and I don’t know of any Threadiverse-native clients that do. I think the major point I’d raise would be “you could probably do it, but…what do you gain that outweighs the drawbacks?” Like, I think that you’d probably get more good out of just picking your favorite native Threadiverse client and adding code to that (or starting a new one, if you absolutely can’t stand any of the existing ones).
-
did you mean to mark this post as NSFW?
I thought Lemmy/selfhost was getting spicy.
Tap for my attempt at being sexy...
I was having a good day until you posted this racist, redneck, bastard.
I have no idea who he is. My bad. Will edit
His name is Lindsey Graham and all you have to do is look up his name and ‘racist’. It’s not your fault. As you said, you didn’t know who he is. No harm, no foul. I’ll put up with a lot of bullshit from a lot of people, but I just have no tolerance for racists. Stupidest thing I’ve ever heard from people who didn’t choose their skin color either. Former president LBJ, who had his own issues with racism, said something that will stand the test of time:
“If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”
the content of the proposed emails were never fully disclosed 😏 much is left to the imagination, is allimsayin
I heard it’s a Mastodon thing
@dandelion @selfhosted NO! And it’s the third person, third time, who tells me this.
Maybe it’s Lemmy who marks as nsfw mentioned posts coming from outside its community?could be however you’re making the posts is configured to default to NSFW? 🤷♀️ I don’t know what platform you’re using, but based on the tags I assume Mastodon?
@dandelion I’ll check my app’s settings then. Maybe it’s something wrong in them. I’ll adjust it, if so. Thanks for warnings (when many people say there’s something wrong, it’s the case to check our setup)
much luck! I wish I was able to help more, but I don’t use Mastodon and I’m not too familiar with this issue unfortunately 😞
Sounds doable, will need a bit of scripting, but I don’t really get the use case.
my response would be to run a mail server with widely published email addrs for a while. you’ll see how much fun it is to mitigate spam vs just moderating signups on your fediverse instance.
postfix/dovecot flow through my veins and I think one just popped imagining it. I may not be getting the end game here.
OP: Do you mean sending DM/PM’s to users at certain instances? This would require each one to have correctly (and strict) aligned SPF/DMARC/DKIM … or a cluster that handles it for them and pushes it via API to the instance.
