[Themaintainers] Maintainers email list migration

[Joshua Braun]

Hi All,

Long-time listener, sporadic caller here. As someone who studies digital content circulation, I just wanted to endorse/add to a few points made on the list thus far:

(1) I second Mike Roy's recommendation of the Gizmodo series—the last piece in that series, in particular, is excellent in highlighting the fact that for a huge variety of branded "alternatives," it's still going to be Google or (more typically) Amazon Web Services under the hood that's providing the delivery infrastructure. This makes wholesale boycotts of the frightful five particularly difficult. That said, that doesn't necessarily mean that narrower boycotts—e.g., not using GSuite—have no meaning. It's just worth thinking of them in context.

(2) I'd personally support running your own mailing list or using a progressive alternative like Riseup that explicitly eschews reliance on the big five. My understanding, though, is that mailing list software is often janky when installed on shared hosting services. The reason I've heard is that when your domain is hosted on the same box as umpteen other domains, if any one of those other sites uses the same infrastructure to send problematic email messages, it's not uncommon for mail administrators on the receiving end to bluntly blacklist all messages coming from the shared hosting box. Thus, one bad actor using your shared hosting can create a situation where outbound messages from all the domains on the same hosting box get blocked. Dedicated hosting is more expensive, but avoids this problem.

(3) I'd also just highlight the fact that, given how difficult it is to actually opt out of some of these services, we're all faced with participating in and critiquing them simultaneously. The Maintainers list seems like a good place (and topic about which) to have a discussion about how to do that meaningfully. Being hosted by Google doesn't necessarily preclude having powerful discussions about how Google treats its employees or the negative externalities it creates. Whether it makes those conversations less meaningful is an important question, but I don't know that the answer is cut-and-dried.

My 2¢!

Cheers,
Josh


On 3/13/19 11:15 PM, Roy, Michael D. wrote:
> On a lovely hike south of Monterey today, free of cell service, my friend and colleague recommended to me the recently published five part piece on Gizmodo by Kashmir Hill on her six week experiment with avoiding the Big Five https://gizmodo.com/c/goodbye-big-five
>
> This seems relevant to the question of whether or not to use google groups for this particular group. 
>
> The dismal take-away for me was that these small choices we might make in the end are probably pointless, and that the bigger question of how our infrastructure is regulated is something that needs to be sorted not by our individual choices but by whoever it is we end up sending to represent us in our various governments.
>
> That said, if we want to ditch the Googleverse, I can highly recommend Reclaim Hosting (https://reclaimhosting.com/ ) which provides a robust and ever growing suite of open source programs that might prove to be a winning solution. Of course, going that route requires that we sign up to maintain all of this, but as others have pointed out, perhaps that is consistent with the general gestalt of this group.
>
> Mike
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Michael Roy
> Dean of the Library
> Middlebury College
>
> mobile: 860 301 2611
> twitter: @michaeldroy
> skype:  roymichaeldonald
> zoom: https://middlebury.zoom.us/my/mikeroy 
>
> free/busy calendar https://beta.doodle.com/mikeroy <https://beta.doodle.com/mikeroy>
>
>
> On Tue, Mar 12, 2019 at 10:35 AM Andrew Russell <arussell at arussell.org <mailto:arussell at arussell.org>> wrote:
>
>     Please say more!  We’ve got mixed feelings about GSuite, but we identified it as a solution since we already use it for our web/email hosting.  And it’s unwise to depend on the generosity (or benign neglect!) of a place where Lee and I no longer work.  (I happen to like mailman installations, but my current employer doesn’t support it.)
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>     Andy 
>
>
>
>>     On Mar 12, 2019, at 1:29 PM, Camille E. Acey <connect at camilleacey.com <mailto:connect at camilleacey.com>> wrote:
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>>     Darn. I'm sad to see you go this direction. 😫
>>
>>     On March 12, 2019 1:09:10 PM EDT, Andrew Russell <arussell at arussell.org <mailto:arussell at arussell.org>> wrote:
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>>         Hey Everyone,
>>
>>         The Maintainers is maturing a notch - we’re now in a position to migrate The Maintainers listserv off of our former employer's server, and into The Maintainer's own GSuite hosted at themaintainers.org <http://themaintainers.org/>. 
>>
>>         As a heads up, please mark your calendar: Next Monday, March 18th...
>>
>>           * We'll migrate the email addresses on this listserv to the new list at themaintainers at themaintainers.org <mailto:themaintainers at themaintainers.org>. You'll receive a welcome message once your email is added to the new system. 
>>           * Starting next Monday, email this list at its new home themaintainers at themaintainers.org <mailto:themaintainers at themaintainers.org>. 
>>           * Once the migration is complete, we’ll request that the current (aka original) maintainers list be retired.
>>
>>         Suggestions and/or questions are welcomed - please send them our way.
>>
>>         Thank you!
>>
>>         Andy & Lee
>>
>>
>>     -- 
>>     Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.
>
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-- 
Josh Braun, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Journalism Studies
Journalism Department
University of Massachusetts Amherst

@josh_braun
Skype: wideaperture
http://wideaperture.net/
book: http://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300197501/program-brought-you

"Maybe the only gift is a chance to inquire, to know nothing for certain.  An inheritance of wonder and nothing more."
William Least Heat-Moon

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