[TriEmbed] Monday Mtg & email list

Pete Soper pete at soper.us
Fri Jan 8 11:19:25 CST 2021


On 1/8/21 10:42 AM, Gregg Tracton via TriEmbed wrote:

I disagree that these are all good points.

>
> Ads pay the bills. Who pays the bills for the mailist?

I do. The cost is about 1/10 as much as I've lost with bad biz decisions 
in six months. Figuring this list is 10% of my personal domain server 
fees that's vaguely $50 so far for the past seven years, and if it was a 
burden people would fall all over themselves to relieve me of it. A 
virtual hat was passed and the domain registration is paid up until 
5/25/2027. Ads we don't agree to are not my idea of a community service. 
I long ago passed on somebody's urging that we monetize the web site, 
let alone the email list. I've even hesitated to put a badge on the site 
to publish the tiny ISP that's kept things going for me with amazing 
availability numbers for over 20 years.

I would offer Google Hangouts to consider, where the entire stream of 
content is persistent and, with enough back flips, possible to archive. 
Except Google is putting a bullet through Hangouts' head in a few months 
and I'm not happy about the traffic going through their systems anyway 
and so I doubt I'd want to contribute to that change. (Of course: 90+% 
of you use Gmail, so this might seem moot). I'm told everybody should 
use the new "improved" Google Meet that segregates the AI training chat 
to a separate app. And Meet works very, very well for audio and video 
but the built in chat bites.

In my opinion a valid complaint is the limit on message sizes and some 
forms of multimedia files being banned (by my ISP and he won't budge 
because the vast majority of his users are on Windows systems and many 
might still be W95!). Nobody has yelled much about this, to my 
amazement. But my ISP deal is killer: if we need more space we can get 
it, so bumping the posting size limit from 250kilobytes is not cast in 
stone.

The amateur radio contesting list I'm on (also a GNU Mailman list) is an 
overflowing fountain of useful information, friendly exchanges, 
comradery, people bailing others out of crisis situations (software with 
radio contesting is COMPLEX these days and Murphy waits until five 
minutes into the BIG CONTEST before hosing you), etc. And yes, it's old 
farts (guestimate median age of 58 and close to zero under 30). But it's 
because we can get the *whole story* about poorly or maliciously 
designed social media choices that if forced to move to FB there would 
be very strong push back by many of the guys (yes, guys: amateur radio 
in this country is roughly as sexist as so many other tech cliques and 
the contesters are about 3X 'cause of extra layers of hangups that 
create a very strong repulsion field). Actually, it's more fundamental 
than that. The guy who has kept that list going for the past 25 years 
would simply refuse to switch to FB and that would be the end of it, 
'cause that group is run by a half a shoestring too and nobody, but 
nobody would look forward to owning a GNU Mailman list who hasn't had 
any contact  with "computing in the old days" because it is simply alien 
compared to modern approaches. But there is no walled garden with our 
list. It could be moved to another  server in an hour's time by my ISP 
coordinating with others.

>
> And the PRO's are overwhelming: deleting posts (ex, to limit the spread of
That's been a hypothetical with this list: it is impossible to delete a 
post from the archive without begging to the ISP, and this has never 
happened with this list. Instead we're extremely careful to vet 
subscribers, but the bad actors are absolutely obvious like 
igor at pornRus.ru . But maybe I misunderstood your use of "PRO".
> a bad link), simple polls, splitting broadcasts from conversations, or 
> a Q&A
> requirement that qualifies members for joining, like:
>   name a circuit you're familiar with.
>   what's the functional difference between a robot and a cyborg?

That doesn't wash. The email traffic level is less than trivial. Getting 
on the email list is less than trivial: mailto:admin at triembed.org 
<mailto:admin at triembed.org> . I just tried it, and from clicking on the 
main page, then email, then the admin link took less than 10 seconds. 
Hmm, maybe should have this at the bottom of postings and a button on 
the main web page.

But finally, this has all happened before. Before Internet was Arpanet 
and before that was UUCP along with a vast but less sophisticated 
bulletin boards, both driven by dialup modems. Remember usenet? Remember 
the extraordinarily deep, broad discussions roughly segregated by 
categories? That worked extremely well. There wasn't the division of 
modern social media as much as fractured, bruised and battered egos, 
chronic degeneration to ad hominem when somebody runs out of logical 
arguments, etc. It was people being people, the trolling was easier to 
see, but also the demographics of the participants was profoundly 
different in contrast to after the Internet opened comms up to almost 
everybody. But apart from (debatable) demographic changes being a 
proximal cause of negativity I think one reason for the difference is 
that it wasn't monetized, most especially not by folks who /do not have 
users best interests as their highest priority/. In my opinion search 
and social media business models and people's perfectly human but 
apparently unbounded greed have all but destroyed journalism, most 
especially at the local level, and the rest, as they say, is history.

-Pete

> Enjoy the faux snow today
> -gregg
>
> On Fri, Jan 8, 2021 at 9:31 AM John Vaughters via TriEmbed 
> <triembed at triembed.org <mailto:triembed at triembed.org>> wrote:
>
>     It's a new decade, email lists just aren't kool anymore. Can't
>     remember the last Trilug or TAR email. Over all the email lists in
>     my life, TriEmbed is the last one that even has some activity. So
>     Kudos to this group, no matter how small for keeping that torch
>     and thanks to the organizers that keep it going.
>
>     I remember a discussion in my early 30's with a then retiree. This
>     question I posed, "I wonder what technology will expire my
>     participation in the world?" Turns out I have the answer. Social
>     Media. `,~)
>
>     Of course like all young foolish peeps like I was, I thought, "My
>     generation is more flexible, more adaptable to change because we
>     grew up in a tech changing world?" I even floated the possibility
>     in the conversation. But the truth is I knew human nature and
>     history too well even then. I knew that most of us stop being the
>     hip crowd at some point in life.
>
>     I just can't do social media. No interest there what so ever.
>
>     But there you have it, a generational divide. I do not mean to
>     apply my thoughts to any single individual other than me, but I do
>     think I am just an example of many in my generation. Most people
>     end up being divided in some form or manner and technology is a
>     big divider. Just like my Grandparents always needed their VCR
>     clock set. Just like I hand my phone to my daughter to fix crap I
>     just don't really care about. I can keep the lights on by
>     maintaining power plants, but I could care less about the silly
>     world of Social Media. But isn't that my divide? Of course it is.
>
>     Not saying I don't use it, but I am saying I generally don't like it.
>
>     Have a fine day,
>
>     John Vaughters
>
>
>
>
>
>     On Friday, January 8, 2021, 8:53:14 AM EST, Pete Soper via
>     TriEmbed <triembed at triembed.org <mailto:triembed at triembed.org>>
>     wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
>     The web site has a meeting reminder now with bread crumbs to the
>     Jitsi URL.
>
>     The TriEmbed email list subscriptions have been (99.9%) monotonically
>     decreasing for a few years. It is a shame the TAR list was lost in
>     case
>     a set difference could have been used for invitations to this
>     list. So
>     goes life.
>
>
>     -Pete
>
>
>
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>
> -- 
> Gregg Tracton: tired, retired & inappropriately unattired (PJ's)
>
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