Cave-Surveying Digest, Vol 49, Issue 1

[Wookey]

On 2023-09-28 13:12 +0000, Graham Mullan wrote:

> Jeskynar asked what alternative places people use to talk about surveying and I think this is a key question. Email lists of this type are fairly poorly structured for ongoing discussions

Only if your mail software is bad, but of course many people these
days use pretty bad email software.

> and archival searches and better alternatives are available. The problem is that any of the alternatives require the use of some proprietary software or 'walled garden' private services

That's not correct. Open source discussion forum software exists. Such as 'discourse' (there are plenty of others such as SMF, but discourse is modern). Matrix is also open, and the cave-surveying matrix channel sees a lot more traffic than this mailing list does these days.

I suggest that people just use that:
https://matrix.to/#/#cave-surveying:matrix.org

(You'll need to create a matrix account if you don't already have one,
like all such services - but matrix is federated (like email) so you
can use your own server, or a local jurisdiction server, and the
service won't be selling your data)

> and I know that many of you have problems with that. I suspect that if that objection can be overcome then something like Discord might fulfil the brief rather better.

discourse is discord without the propritary aspect. But someone has to host it, and admin it, just like the mailing list, or use a public server like http://dicourse.org
And all these fancy web-based interfaces are more work than a mailing list to maintain.

As I say #cave-surveying:matrix.org is already set up and has been in
use since Feb 2022. I suggest anyone wanting to talk about
cave-surveying signs up there and uses that. The default interface is
'element' on your phone or a brower, but plenty of others exist. (I use
revolt and sometimes nheko).

Wookey
-- 
Principal hats:  Debian, Wookware, ARM
http://wookware.org/
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