<nettime> don't prune us

On 11 Jul 2023, at 5:29 PM, John Preston via Nettime-tmp <[email protected]> wrote:

Hi all,

Here is a longform summary of the synchronous meeting held today.

There is general agreement to move to servus.at as the new host for the

mailing list. They have about 2000 email accounts and a few hundred mailing

lists so there are no concerns about management or scale.

We talked about problems with bots, and they are currently working on a

solution.

After the move, the intention for signup process seems to be to keep it the

same as it is now: users have to confirm their email via a link, and then be

manually approved by a moderator. We think this is currently scalable, effective

for managing spam, and gives mod team a feel for "who's coming and going", which

is nice to know.

We expect the move to take a couple of weeks, and there was some discussion

about when is a good time to do this, given it's summer now. Eventually the

archive and website will move as well, but probably that will happen after the

new list is established.

An initial pool of new moderators is now being formed and I think people will

meet again soon to organise this. I think Jordan, Christian, and Menno expressed

interest in joining the new mod squad.

We also talked about pruning the subscriber list and figuring out how best to

coordinate the move. This is an open question for the mod team to figure out

what to do, but there were suggestions of using the invitation function on the

new list to send out invites to everyone with activity in the last year, as a

way to make sure the most active members are able to migrate effectively, and

find a balance with just resubscribing lots of people who maybe don't want to

be on the list.

There was brief discussion about using the nettime.org domain name for the

mailing list, and this is still an open question. Ted would like to maintain

ownership for now and act as a guarantor, since it also points to other services

like our website and the Mastodon instance [1]. Overall there did not seem to

be much concern either way in terms of the mailing list, as we expect host

moves to be few and far between.

We also talked about the role of moderation on the list, and making sure this is

also about creating energy in the list, and bringing new people into the space.

Ted pointed out that diversity is an issue for nettime, as the homogeneity has

both allowed the list to last for a long time, but also caused it to "ossify".

Vesna had some good suggestions for organising small meetups and remote hubs,

and we talked about arranging meetings at in person events like Ars Electronica

and Transmediale. Also we said these should be publicised so we are making

nettime an open space that new people can get involved in, regardless of if they

like mailing lists or want to be part of the list.

I also raised the idea of doing more events on-list and off-list, such as a

'show and tell' thread where people can just talk about what they're working on

at the moment, or having coffee calls where people can have a chat and get to

know other people in the community. Someone also mentioned the idea of inviting

people not on the list to write guest posts, which I like because it grows the

community and allows us to explore the use of a mailing list as a publication

platform as well as just a space for connecting and discussing.

Probably there is a bunch of stuff I missed because I got distracted halfway

through, and then had to leave early, but I hope this is a useful summary for

the list! ❤

[1] I actually missed that we have a Mastodon instance! It's at

<https://tldr.nettime.org/> if anyone is interested 🙂

Thanks,

John (they/them)

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