| Felix Stalder on Wed, 30 Nov 2022 14:39:47 +0100 (CET) |
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| Re: <nettime> Moving Nettime to the Fediverse |
Hi Goeffrey, from a technical point of view, the problem with mailing lists is twofold.First, maintaining a mail server has become progressively more work over the years.
Second, what a mailman mailing list does is, essentially, rewriting the header, ie making this mail appears as it came from "felix@openflows.com" when it was actually sent from nettime-l@kmx.kein.org. On the level of social communication, this makes sense, but technically, this is what a lots of spammers do as well and many large email providers block such mail. In addition, 'spoofing' headers makes it more likely to land on anti-spam blacklists which one of the reasons for the first point.
Socially, the problem is that email as a social (rather then administrational) medium is a bit of a historical artifact. I don't mean only that it's a generational thing, but for many people communication habits have shifted over the last decade or two. Personally, the emails that sit the longest in my inbox, and generate the most personal guilt, are the social ones which take time to answer, which I often don't have. And my impression is that I'm not alone here.
I totally agree that it's naive to assume technical solutions to social problems, but sometime some of the social problems are created by the specifics of the technical environment and changing these specifics can help to address them.
And, yes, you are right, I'm a bit bored with maintaining the infrastructure as is, so I would rather change it.
all the best. Felix On 30.11.22 04:19, Geoffrey Goodell wrote:
Dear Doma, Felix, and Ted I am confused by your recurring argument that the problem with Nettime is fundamentally technical in nature, or indeed that there is a problem with Nettime at all. Speaking personally, Nettime works well for me. I read interesting commentary from people I respect, with the reassurance that I can always add my voice to the symphony. The fact that I do not post more often is mainly testament to the fact that I am busy with other responsibilities. I am sure that this is true of others here as well. This problem will not suddenly disappear with a shift to a different choice of underpinning technology. In fact, it will be exacerbated, because although I run my own e-mail server, the tools for engaging with the so-called 'fediverse' are not part of my workflow. And so, a shift in technology will inexorably induce a 'shake out' in which people are forced to either adopt new workflows or face exclusion. I would have thought that the moral foundation of Internet ethics would be incompatible with the use of force in this way. As far as I know, the argument that 'fediverse' technology, such as that used by Hometown and Mastodon, is superior to e-mail is weak at best and has never been articulated to this group. As far as I know, such technology is in the hands of a handful of software developers and has not been subject to the same rigorous standardisation process of the sort that led to the establishment of e-mail. I suspect that most people on this list did not use e-mail before 1977, by which point RFC 724 was already published [1]. Of course, this standard has evolved over the years, in a direction that has benefited the world and is now used by billions of people. As far as I know, there has not yet been a comparable community-based effort to standardise the implementation of 'fediverse' protocols. Here, we have precisely the sort of platform-based tyranny by fiat that the Internet pioneers laboured to bury forever. Finally, I find the argument that new technology can solve a fundamentally social problem to be absurd and somewhat hypocritical based on the topic of discussion on this list. While I am not convinced that the so-called 'fediverse' is a solution looking for a problem, I am also not convinced that it will make things better for us. Perhaps some of the maintainers of the current infrastructure are bored of the job to which they volunteered, years ago. In that case, they should step aside and leave the task of maintaining this list to others. Surely there are democratic and less-than-democratic ways to achieve this; let's try something. Perhaps a call for volunteers might be a start. But what I can say with certainty is that if you pack up and go somewhere else, not everyone will follow you, and even fewer people will follow if you neglect to provide a solid argument for why. Whether you like it or not, Nettime is more than a toy project of yours; it provides a valuable service that works. Let's stick together. Best wishes -- Geoff [1] https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc724 On Tue, 29 Nov 2022 at 11:34:35PM -0100, nettime's mod squad wrote: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 ??? 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 ??? 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 ??? 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# 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: nettime@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:# 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: nettime@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
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