It's certainly cool that the same listserv has worked decently well for so long, but software for group communication and message distribution has really come a long way in thirty years, and that's not a bad thing when used conscientiously. Something like Google Groups or Discourse is flexible enough that people who want a traditional listserv experience can have it by default, people who want no email and a browser based experience that isn't thirty years old can have it, and people like me who want a more complex setup (in my case, a daily digest that actually works but also handles modern email formats along with mutes etc) can also have some options. Better software means more flexibility for different users' preferences so that more of the community can enjoy being part of the community. So I think it's worth considering.
Sam
On April 16, 2025, Sarah Hargus Ferguson <sarah.ferguson@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I don’t think the problem is the tech or the model, it’s that one person started treating the list like social media. Sure, there can be some “discussion”, but a single person responding over and over to keep
making their point? That’s what I think has prompted so many people to ask to leave the list (after apparently ignoring so many messages that they’ve now missed not one but two notes from the admin about how to
actuallyleave the list), because that’s not what we’ve historically been here for. I’ve been on the list for around 30 years and find it VERY valuable when I’m struggling with a concept or have a job to post. This group has been cheerful and
generous nearly all of the time.
I find it easy enough to delete emails that don’t apply to me, even on days like today when there are over 20 posts to the list. For some reason all of the messages to the list come to me overnight so they’re
all in one nice bundle of messages that I can peruse each morning.
Sarah Hargus Ferguson, PhD, CCC-A
Associate Professor
Director of Graduate Studies, Audiology
Pronouns: She/her/hers
Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders
<image001.png>
I acknowledge that I live, work, and recreate on the traditional and ancestral homeland of the Shoshone, Paiute, Goshute, and Ute Tribes.
From: AUDITORY - Research in Auditory Perception <AUDITORY@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
On Behalf Of JONATHAN SAUNDERS Sent: Monday, April 14, 2025 10:52 PM To: AUDITORY@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: Re: [AUDITORY] better listserv tech
"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!
——— Samuel Mehr School of Psychology, University of Auckland and Child Study Center, Yale University Be a citizen scientist at themusiclab.org!