They’re no longer accepting users posts after 28th of October, and will be fully deleted on the 14th of December.
While some of the members of the groups will be busy scrambling around trying to backup everything, This would be an opportunity to build a Co-operatively owned version with identical functionality.
Any suggestions as to where to begin?
This is of great interest to me as some of the Hardware groups that i use as a technical resource, will be shut down.
Also, while I’m willing to fund the initial set-up for this, i can’t afford to keep it going long-term, so an thoughts about how to finance this would be welcome.
There’s a large existing mailing list, ~5593 members, with the usual breakdown ratio’s of lurkers, passive-recipients. sporadically active, and, regular posters.
There’s a large number of members who are older, which is why it’s on Yahoo, rather than the newer forums.
The mods are talking internally about moving to gingery-machines@groups.io | Home but as i don’t know about the ownership and hosting of the Groups.io website, i’m hesitating, as i don’t want to move platforms, just to get the same problem in a few years time.
I got burnt by this during the Thingiverse sale to a company that instantly changed the T&C’s in their favour, and, against the user’s interests.
It’s why i prefer to use system’s that i can own and control, ie. Co-operatives.
At the moment, i’m only talking about the groups that i’m interested in, but if we can provide a credible alternative, then i don’t see why the others wouldn’t move across as welll.
I’d suggest that Discourse provides a very nice alternative to email lists these days, but it isn’t cheap to host or maintain.
Another web based discussion forum that we could host for a lot less would be Flarum, this can be run from regular shared hosting.
The cheapest option would be Mailman lists these can be hosted on our generic domain, email-lists.org or a virtual server can be provided if you want full control over a Mailman instance.
