On Sun, Dec 1, 2024 at 1:13?PM Dave McGuire via groups.io
<mcguire@...> wrote:
On 12/1/24 12:24, Dr. David Kirkby, Kirkby Microwave Ltd wrote:
Groups.io is a commercial vendor of mailing list services. They
provide a web interface for list administrators to manage their lists,
as well as for people to view archives of past list traffic. In recent
years that functionality has been (inadvisably, IMO) extended to
include
posting messages to the mailing list from the web interface as well.
Groups.io offers FAR more functionality than a mailing list. A mailing
list doesn¡¯t offer 30 GB of file storage, a wiki, and a whole host of
other features that the group has. Not all features are enabled on this
group, as they would serve no useful purpose.
It¡¯s your personal preference whether you use the other features, but
they exist and other people do use them. I feel that they should be
encouraged to use them.
While I generally agree, we would do well to bear in mind why those
additional features exist, and remember what happened to groups.io's
predecessor, Yahoo Groups.
Anyone can serve up mailing lists. Hell, I run a dozen of them from
my company's network, no commercial BS involved. Companies like
groups.io offer additional stuff to capture users' data and create
vendor lock-in situations, in which it's very difficult to migrate away.
Then when everyone is using the file archives, the wikis, the
databases, etc etc, they start raising their prices.
This has been done by every company offering such services, and
indeed it has been done by groups.io themselves.
And when they shut down, or give users another compelling reason to
move en masse, that data can be very difficult to recover in any usable
way. Witness the Yahoo Groups disaster.
Yes, some of these additional facilities are interesting and useful.
They're designed to be. And once you start using one of them, it's easy
to start using more and more of them. Then you're stuck.
So while I agree that such facilities are useful, I think they should
be utilized with great care, backups, and a fallback plan. Corporations
typically do not have our interests in mind, and we need to remember
that. They are not charities or people working to help us with our
craft, they exist to make MO' MONEY MO' MONEY by whatever means
possible. Trust them at your peril.
All this is true and somehow also invisible to most users now.
I wonder how to make it apparent now but that's kind of an off list topic.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA
