On Fri 2021-08-06 09:35:52 +0200, Ralph Seichter wrote: > Oh my... Are "+1" replies not sufficient anymore for some people, or is > this a means of allowing the authors to claim having created an RFC, no > matter how useless it is? ;-)
fwiw, i think this is a little bit ridiculous too. ☺ But in addition to being an e-mail user, i also use instant messaging platforms. The targeted emoji feedback feature offered by platforms like Signal Private Messenger is a real boon to making the conversation flow -- especially in a fast-moving group discussion. By contrast, e-mail threads with a ton of "+1"s, are hard to read, daunting even to approach (does anyone like opening a thread with a dozen unread messages in it?), and are especially problematic when it's unclear which message a given "+1" is approving of. If we want e-mail to be able to offer a similar cadence and experience -- if we want a decentralized, federated e-mail system to be able to *compete* with messaging services, I think we do need to think about these affordances. Put another way: - for years, e-mail "experts" (including myself, not infrequently) have lamented patterns like "+1" or "metoo" threads, top-posting of trivial replies with huge quoted/attributed texts blindly re-re-re-transmitted, and other "netiquette violations" that do really legitimately have negative side effects for other participants in the thread. But users who generate messages falling into these patterns aren't "doing e-mail wrong," they're trying to express themselves, and they're relying on the tooling that most MUAs offer, clumsy as they may be. If we really want to minimize the negative side effects, we need to think about how to help people express themselves over e-mail, and make it easy/convenient/enjoyable to do so. Otherwise, e-mail will be relegated further and further into an awkward communications backwater, used only in certain work environments, and maybe feared or loathed by its users. :/ I'll also be clear: i don't like the weakening of public discourse to single-glyph responses to potentially-thoughtful messages (i also don't like 280-character limits, fwiw). But i do use them sometimes, and sometimes they're appropriate and the most light-weight way to communicate what's necessary to communicate. I'd rather have them available to me in e-mail. To my mind, there are some interesting wrinkles that come up in trying to apply the affordance to e-mail, specifically in this way. for example, if Alice sends Message-ID: X to Bob and Carol, and Bob sends Message-ID: Y that is In-Reply-To: X to Alice and Carol and is Content-Disposition: reaction (following RFC 9078), what would it mean if Carol sends Message-ID: Z that is In-Reply-To: Y (whether Content-Disposition: reaction or otherwise)? Cryptographically, they're also interesting: as formulated, these responses *cannot* be generated or interpreted responsibly with any of the current cryptographic e-mail standards that don't ensure that e-mail headers are protected the same as the message body. To fix this, we'd need to invest more work in projects like https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-lamps-header-protection/. I don't have a lot of bandwidth to work on this myself right now, but if someone wanted to take a stab at figuring out these issues for notmuch, i would definitely be supportive. RFC 9078 is marked as experimental. notmuch development could offer a chance to contribute data to that experiment, if anyone is of a mind to do the work. --dkg
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