<nettime> Moving Nettime to the Fediverse

[nettime's mod squad <nettime@kein.org>]

Dear nettimers,

Nettime was founded at a time when, as quaint as it sounds, email was exciting.
That's long since gone for those who experienced it, let alone for those who
didn't. Discussion-oriented mailing lists like this are, in a word, over,
technically *and* culturally. It's time to think more attentively about whether
or how nettime can evolve beyond email and its peculiar 'list culture.'

And it's not just email. The edifices that have displaced and replaced lists
are on the rocks too. Twitter is widely thought to be going over a cliff as
Facebook, already graying, sinks under the weight of its "Metaverse." As more
and more people cast around for alternatives, net.critique has become a bit of
a thing again.

We say: let's ditch the mailing list and start moving to the fediverse. Toward
this end, we've set up an instance < https://tldr.nettime.org > with the
following bare-bones "about":

tldr.nettime is an instance for artists, researchers, and activists interested
in exploring the intersections of technology, culture, and politics.

It has grown out of nettime-l, one of the longest-running mailing lists on the
net â?? in particular, on the 'cultural politics of the internet'.

tldr.nettime is based on Hometown, a fork of Mastodon. It's compatible with the
wider fediverse, but it also offers two tweaks we hope will help make it
unusually fruitful:

   * The character count per message is higher â?? 2000 chars at the moment.

   * You can choose whether your post is public or visible only on tldr's local
timeline and only to tldr's members.

Aside from that, everything is raw by design: it's for those who make the move
to define what this instance will be and how we can make it useful.

This is a chance to move beyond nettime's shrinking in-group, so feel free to
invite others. Our goal is to keep tldr to a size where the local timeline
remains a useful tool for an actual, not rhetorical, community; how big that is
remains to be seen.

In the longer run, we won't maintain two infrastructures, one for email, one
for the fediverse. At some point we'll close one â?? ideally, which one will be a
collective decision.

So, we hope this is the beginning of change in every sense, hopefully including
some of the imbalances that have plagued the mailing list for many years.
There's no clear path or process ahead, so this is a free-form, open invitation
to get involved. As they say: be the change you want to see on nettime.

See you on the other side

Doma, Felix & Ted

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