Create a bisq-announce mailing list to replace now-defunct MailChimp newsletter about proposals

[cbeams]

I'm closing this as approved, but need to be clear: I'm not going to do this work myself. @Emzy can help with anything technical around the mailing list itself, and @m52go, if you want to spearhead the effort, write the content, etc, you're more than welcome to take this ball and run with it. In any case, it sounds like we agree this would be of value for Bisq users whether we do it now or at some point in the future.

And @HarryMacfinned, regarding your concerns about privacy above, I believe we've addressed this elsewhere. Such a mailing list, operated by @Emzy, and with a non-public list of subscribers is pretty reasonably as privacy risks go, and as mentioned elsewhere, signing up for such a list is completely optional; those who have extreme privacy concerns would stay away from it anyway. Lots of users would use protonmail accounts, or whatever, and many users would happily sign up with their own email addresses. People are free to take whatever degree of risk they can tolerate.

[cbeams]

@bisq-network/contributors, this proposal hasn't gotten much of a response since I posted it 9 days ago. If this is a topic that interests you, please take a few minutes to review and react to it. Thanks.

[Emzy]

Sorry missed that.
It sounds all good to me.

Anti-spam compliance

Yes this needs more work. I have to do some more configurations on the server for that.
But should be possible.

What to do with the existing 3,000 list subscribers

The import is no problem. We also can ping the subscriber to approve the subscription, but with the old-school way from mailman.

Can we automate the process of signing up for a Mailman list?

I have to look into that. Seems the only obstacle right now.

[m52go]

Sorry for reacting so late...I wasn't sure if I could really add any value to the discussion, aside from saying I really like the idea and am willing to own the role when the infrastructure is set up.

I think email is crucial, and something we shouldn't overlook, even if the approach is a bit minimalist.

We can still do HTML email if we want to, and while we may not want to do any fancy templates, we can still include attachments, screenshots, etc.

To be honest, I wouldn't be surprised to see super-concise text-only emails get higher engagement than heavy graphical ones. The Bisq userbase would almost surely prefer it, and information overload is only increasing every day for everyone else.

The medium is really the message here; by moving to a lo-fi Mailman mailing list, we're letting people know that this is a no-frills, value-oriented communication channel, not a marketing tool designed to surveil and manipulate.

Agreed. Also, as I mentioned above, I think merely using the list trumps the lack of analytic fanciness, at least in the short term. Beyond that we can play it by ear. I get the impression Bisq's primary source of growth will be word-of-mouth, social mentions, etc anyway...so I'm not sure we'll ever need to have particularly sophisticated email marketing infrastructure.

Although we can't measure open rates, we could experiment with specific calls to action unique to a particular email campaign as an indirect way to measure engagement (get people to tweet a particular hashtag, etc).

This seems like an entirely legit thing to do, but if anyone has a reason to object to this, please speak up.

I want to say that these folks have opted to receive emails from Bisq about Bisq, and the infrastructure we use to deliver those emails is irrelevant. But I'm not a lawyer.

If this proposal is approved, I would want to announce it via Twitter in conjunction with making a bit of noise about MailChimp shutting us down.

This would be awesome.

Hello,
The Bisq client software makes great technical efforts to try to protect anonymity of its users. P2P, Decentralization of data, Tor, DHT, etc.
I understand the willing for some marketing ... but a mailing list (as some other communication tool) seems me quite dangerous for the users. Once somebody gets the mailist adresses, it's not too difficult to get the real identities behind. There are already existing specialized firms who do such jobs on the behalf of gov agencies, eg converting BTC adresses in real identities.
a 3000 subscriber list is a nice shortlist to use as a supplementary filtering criteria for identification.

What is the use of an anonymous tool (strongly claimed as such),
when it is in fact plugged in an environment/ecosystem of non-anonymous tools ?

imho, I would search other marketing tools as those ones.
There are some privacy respect tools poping up here and there, it may be better looking on those new tools than tools absolutely not designed to respect or help anonymity.

(I think this remark also applies for other tools actually used : youtube, twitter, etc.
I have noticed for example that for the last youtube events, there are people looking, but few subscribers ... and this seems me completely understandable).

[m52go]

For the record -- I considered picking this up for the DAO launch (had configured a Mailtrain server), but then decided against using it for these reasons:

• no street address, needed for US CAN-SPAM
• GDPR compliance is murky
• list has been dormant for over a year, so would need to be pruned
• effectiveness not clear

Some reasons above are stronger than others, but ultimately I think we're better off using platforms we're already established on, as well as (possibly) pioneering a presence on new platforms like Scuttlebutt or Briar that are more in line with Bisq principles.