-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA512 Hi
On Thursday 5 August 2010 at 1:57:08 AM, in <mid:[email protected]>, Robert J. Hansen wrote: > I strongly suspect that rather than being a minor issue this is in > fact the largest issue shaping the group's development. It's kind of > like gravity. You don't notice it very much, but it shapes your > entire universe. Interesting. I never considered it like that. > People drop off the network because it's stopped becoming useful to > them. The ones who leave tend to be the ones who have derived the > least benefit from being part of the network -- their tolerance is > not as much as those who have gained from being part of the network. > The effect of this is that churn tends to be among new members, not > among long-standing ones. This could be describing almost any social or work-related group! (-; > Once the network shrinks to a state of usability, > people stop leaving. More people sign up, and more > people leave. Etc., etc. This is all pretty basic > networking theory, and it's why completely connected > networks are rarely used in the real world. You can > only build it out so far before hitting a brick wall of > self-limiting behavior. Definitely not scaleable. A bit like a sports league where each team plays against every other twice each season - this reaches a limiting number of participants much quicker than a knock-out competition where those who lose play no further matches. >> It's really no big deal > It's no big deal *for you*. Of course; I claim no mandate to speak for anybody else. > If you want to make a blanket statement of it being no big deal, you > need to take into account the churn on the periphery: all those > people who joined and then left because the key management problem > was nontrivial. I probably under-estimate the amount of churn - partly because few people actually leave the group rather than just stop posting and get culled at the next roll-call. It seems unlikely to me that key management is the major reason people sign up and don't hang around, since that also happens a lot in non-encrypted groups. >> Remember, the communications are neither urgent nor >> important. > That's not especially relevant. If nothing else, I think it is very relevant to where "not encrypted to my key" appears on the scale from major problem to minor issue. > Again -- my remarks here are not meant to be critical of the mailing > list. Nothing of the sort. People who are on the list and like it > should stay on it and I hope they keep liking it. > I really don't want to give the impression I'm turning this into a > referendum on PGPNET's existence. Yes, you have made this very clear. > My remarks here are of general applicability to completely-connected > graphs. The stuff I talk about here is the sort of stuff you can > expect to occur on any large OpenPGP-encrypted mailing list. I > really don't want to give the impression I'm turning this into a > referendum on PGPNET's existence. I guess there is a more scalable model of openPGP-encrypted mailing list. Maybe members could encrypt to a group's key and the list-server decrypt, then re-encrypt for the members? - -- Best regards MFPA mailto:[email protected] Another person's secret is like another person's money: you are not as careful with it as you are with your own -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- iQCVAwUBTFr8PqipC46tDG5pAQqEIwP+IsaNyGda8ZALrk2lztv3yKZnV/Svvo5m a5T9ozv//+dbWRXuZdv39o2FZixrLE5u3LY901VXEaCKhHO3IQL+/uCuIjFUzJWx hPW0VlWpNTz0yrfNZyXxzirgseAzn/Z+w5m75TxmLWub1PPLfoVT+BVOjBqaQmre kOsepzIjz9w= =0Zob -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ Gnupg-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnupg.org/mailman/listinfo/gnupg-users
