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Re: [AUDITORY] better listserv tech

Dear all,

Three brief arguments against moving to a social media platform:
- Stability: Email and listserv are old protocols, but they are stable and unlikely to disappear. Most platforms that the list could have moved to in the 90s, 2000s, and 2010s do not exist anymore.
- Access: Every researcher and student at a university or scientific institute gets an email address through their institution. Email is less likely to be blocked by a country than a social network.
- Ease of use: listserv provides user-level moderation (including unsubscribe, as Dan reminded us a few days ago). In addition, all email clients can filter and block messages by subject/thread. Other protocols will have other complications ("Users have been slow to embrace the Fediverse due to poor user experience and excessive complexity." -from the Wikipedia entry).

I think the old-timey and slower nature of email may have also insulated us from undesirable aspects of social network platforms.
But perhaps this is not what Dan meant at all in his comment to Sam. If a newer list server is easier to administrate for him, I'd be all for it. 

Marc

======================
Dean, Dept of Life Sciences
Professor  of  Neurobiology
Department of Biology
University of Leipzig
Talstrasse 33             __o
04103 Leipzig         _`\<,_
+493419736723    (+) / (+)
& Department of Psychology
University  of  Montreal
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
======================
> 
> On 15. Apr 2025, at 06:51, JONATHAN SAUNDERS <jommy@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> "This meeting (listserv) could have been an email (fediverse instance)"
> 
> This is the space I work in now, and I think the standard replacement would probably be discourse for a closed group, an activitypub instance for a semi-open group (e.g. with closed federation if needed), or atproto appview for world-public group.
> 
> Happy to help keep an old group alive if that's what's needed at the moment :)
> 
>> On Mon, Apr 14, 2025, 21:36 Samuel Mehr <sam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> Hi folks, I was thinking it would be cool if members of the Auditory list had more control over what they see from the list and I wonder if there would be support for moving it from the 'classic' listserv (a physical server, I think, someplace in Montréal) to something more modern with user-level moderation tools. For example, the ability to mute a thread while still seeing other messages to the list would be nice.
>> 
>> Awhile back Dan Ellis mentioned to me that some years ago there was discussion of moving to a more modern server but some people didn't like the idea. This may be worth revisiting — many of us find the Auditory list useful for recruiting students, crowdsourcing help for various esoteric questions, hearing about new papers, uniting a rather disparate set of subfields, and so on, but the very outdated tech of the listserv makes it more difficult than necessary to use and participate in.
>> 
>> Sam
>> 
>> ———
>> Samuel Mehr
>> School of Psychology, University of Auckland
>> and Child Study Center, Yale University
>> Be a citizen scientist at themusiclab.org!