Loomio
Mon 20 May 2019 7:06PM

Teaming up with platformcoop-discuss?

NS Nathan Schneider Public Seen by 43

Many of you may be aware of the recent process underway at the platformcoop-discuss email list. In my most recent message there, sharing results from the first community survey, I've suggested one option should be to better fold that community into Social.coop, since we've already done a lot of the work around governance and conduct codes that would be useful for that community. A couple options I suggested:

  • Simply encourage people to become Social.coop members and use the Mastodon instance
  • Create a new discussion forum (like forum.social.coop) where we could host the discussion list within our governance framework

I'm starting this thread as an open space for discussing this possibility. I hope I wasn't too forward in mentioning these ideas before consulting here first, but I hope we can agree these are kindred communities already.

NS

Nick S Fri 24 May 2019 8:27PM

Thanks, I didn't know about that list before now.

Reading that thread somewhat tardily, I see that you've proposed a resolution of sorts, in that there's now an announcement list, the discussion list stays as-is, and people have the option of using that and/or hopping onto other platforms like social.coop.

This is fine, I think. And I'm not sure we have a lot of human capacity to spare to launch new forums on social.coop (at least, I am currently finding it hard to find the time/impetus to go beyond the bare minimum I'm committed to, although this may be temporary, it is a consequence of having a day job and a family).

Some of the criticism you made of the PC-discuss list seems to me to apply a bit to social.coop too - we've had our fair share of them on social.coop. However as someone said in the thread, I think these problems apply to many internet forums.

It was interesting (to me) to read the meta-discussion about platforms too. I've used mailing lists for decades and so I'm quite comfortable with them on the whole, whereas I find Mastodon a bit too closely modelled on Twitter, and therefore not very useful s a constructive discussion tool. It's more a source of trivia and/or links to useful things elsewhere. Social links too.

So I don't think Mastodon would be a good replacement for a mailing list, but perhaps a good supplement. And the framework of social.coop may be a place to start building a larger community, but I think we haven't solved our self-sustenance problem yet.