Am 01.07.19 um 15:49 schrieb Max Herman: > > Hi André, > > Which of the formerly valuable lists are dead? I'm very far out of the > loop working mostly offline for the last decade.
Dear Max, almost all lists I am subscribed to. Simply members are not posting anymore. I still read nettime. I still get lots of newsletters via list infrastructure channels. Inter-Media Transition is normal. We have other means of online communications. telegram groups, facebook groups, twitter, yodel, slack, mattermost etc. Before usenet groups with their odd clients and rude channel rules became obsolete. A simple method to kill a mailing list is spam. Or low quality communications. Or dumping all kinds of communication into the list. Or opening the mail archive to the general public without asking for prior consent (happened on Liberationtech). Open Archives in return could lead to legal risks in Germany, what do you do as a mailing list admin when you face court injunctions to remove copyrighted or defamatory content from list archives etc. You simply can't risk to let removed content pop up again after an archive regeneration etc. Or other kinds of risks with ML public archives, I just recall an exchange with RMS who didn't bother to call out the president of Zimbabwe on a mailing list frequented by free software people of that country where archives were kindly indexed by google. RMS insisted on his right to free speech. Well, how nice to exercise your rights to converse with people when an incautious reply (which your rant incites) could get them killed or set behind bars and otherwise they cannot respond on equal footing plus all you do is put your associates at risk. Mailman still has a horrible user interface. Often moderators don't moderate anymore because there was too much spam, default settings are suboptimal, spam filtering remains sub-standard. I have no idea why no org financed a Mailman replacement or Mailman NG project. You could also observe the same phenomenon of declining list communications on open source developer lists. Occasionally dead communication channels come to new light. Encrypted mailing lists exist. Almost no one uses them. > One aspect of mailing lists is that they are a powerful example of a > free public sphere (and maybe its most essential expression regardless > of technological advancement). You can put a bunch of content in an > email, and it can go to literally everyone on the planet. Yet who is keeping a record? And how to curate email exchanges? > All that said, a listserv is only as good as its content. If no one > creates any content that is relevant, nothing that cannot be gotten > better elsewhere, then why bother with the noisy clamor of a list? Attention is limited. The time people spent to acknowledge and oppose the latest outrage, the daily trump tweet etc., is missing for serious debate and thought. Online speech is Karl Kraus on steroids, always picking the insignificant targets, always declaration of persons as enemies, always hate mobs that try to engage us. Dialogue becomes impossible as we don't talk with each other anymore but to (at times imaginary) third parties. As "Nick Nailor" (Aaron Eckhart) explained in Thank you for Smoking: "Because I'm not after you, I am after them". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLS-npemQYQ 20 years ago there was a common sentiment that open low-censored online debates, even rude ones, contribute to a better and more open society... only if we would spread the technology to ignorant people from the past and institutions. Like in that previous Ito quote everyone had his or her pivotal moment. Best, André # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
