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).