Mailing list

[Waldek Hebisch]

This is to explain what problems trouble me with mailing list
at Google:

1) From some time ago Google refuses login to Google account
if user does not agree to tracking.
2) Google wants mobile phone number to create an account.
3) Deteriorating quality of Google web archive.

1 and 2 are related: Google agressivly wants to track users
and aggregate all user activity trough Google into single
"profile". I knew about 1 because it became known to me
when I tried to login to my Google account.

I learned about 2 only because my old e-mail address no
longer works, so I wanted to re-connect to mailing list.
Somebody proposed joing from Android phone: if you connect
from Android phone, then most likely Google can get
your phone number without asking you, so that solves
nothing.

To avoid long rant let me say that I find spying (tracking,
analytics etc) by big tech quite troublesome and dangerous
for the society. I am now subscribed because Ralf added my
address by hand. But I am troubled becase having list
at Google we more or less encourage people to agree to
spying (even if we provide option to subscribe by e-mail
to list administrator).

Concerning 3, I would like to have no-nonsense web interface
to group archive. To see resonable approximation you
can look at:

https://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/

or

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/gcl-devel

In case of Google, IMO they move in opposite direction and
can expect only changes for worse.

ATM Github seem to be slightly better than Google, but
trend is clear, unless users rebel Github will move in
the same direction as Google. Language tag issue IMO
nicely show Github attitude: they know very well that
their tags are nonsense for minority languages but are
unwilling to fix it (where easy fix would be to disable
broken misfeature).

--
Waldek Hebisch