Comment on Weird idea continues connecting fediverse and email

onlinepersona@programming.dev ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

• otl@apubtest2.srcbeat.com ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  > I'd much rather have this put in front of LKML than the terrible interface they have right now. Interesting. Could you go into this a bit more? Do you mean for example being able to use the Lemmy web UI to read LKML?

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  • onlinepersona@programming.dev ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Darn it, you got me. I hadn’t thought about it more deeply, but now I’ll give it a few minutes.

    So yeah, a lemmy UI to LKML would make the experience much better. Obviously the LKML serves two purposes: discussion and code review, for which the latter lemmy probably isn’t too well equipped, but it would help make it more approachable.

    Probably to make it work there’d need to be some kind of listener. I imagine signing up to a mailinglist with an email address of the domain running your software would suffice. Incoming emails would then be converted to activitypub messages and sent to the lemmy server you control.

    You’d have two classes of email addressed: list email addresses which map to lemmy communities and user email addresses which map to users on the lemmy server (which could also be remote users in the fediverse). The list email addresses are there to create posts in the lemmy community and populate existing lemmy posts (created in the mailinglist) with responses from the mailinglist (response = comment).

    A user on lemmy on lemmy commenting on a post from a mailinglist would be automatically signed up to the mailinglist with a user email address that’s dynamically created (I think your email has to be signed up otherwise the mailinglist rejects it). Upon successful signup, the response would be sent using their email address to the maillinglist thread.

    The other way around, a comment would show up on lemmy with email address and username of the person that responded on the mailinglist.

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    (10 minutes later) After writing it out, I’m not sure it’s what you’re doing and more like a bridge, but maybe it’ll inspire you. Who knows. There’s probably something I’m missing and probably this isn’t even what your intention was when you started out with this.

    Anyway, do your thing dude and have fun!

    CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

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    • otl@apubtest2.srcbeat.com ⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Hey mate thanks for writing all that down. Gives me a few ideas - in particular how NNTP could fit in to the equation. LKML can be accessed by a usenet client at nntp.lore.kernel.org. In theory, then, it should be possible to at least read *both* LKML and ActivityPub stuff hosted at the same NNTP server. To get that working means making sure all the conversion and mapping of concepts are as clean as possible. It's a good test! Thanks again!

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