Some thoughts on choosing a medium for discussion. Yes, the email list is antiquated and a slow, unsatisfying experience. The problem of replying to everyone when you meant to reply to one person has been an unsolved problem forever, at least since I subscribed about 10 years ago, so at this point, I hope no one is going to waste time apologizing when it's clear that it's the technology that is flawed, not user behavior. When users repeatedly make mistake, it's not their fault, it's that the technology does not appropriately account for user behavior. Users and email readers have been complaining about Reply-All for decades. Finally, modern mail systems have built-in warnings and other things such as "do you really mean to reply to everyone?" etc. Defaults should be clear to users, and embarassment must be easily avoided by default. This is one of the fundamental lessons of User Interface design in the software industry over the last decades. Email lists will apparently never solve this. Add to that the slowness and friction of email (opening each individual message, reading one line of text in someone's reply, closing it, opening the next one, etc.) and how it's intermixed with all your other email, doesn't have photos, and has a very poor signal to noise ratio in terms of screen real estate (lots of repetitions of previous posts quoted or included in current emails, header text, signatures, etc.) Facebook solved all the problems with email and created a wonderful interface where all the replies to a beautiful multimedia post are right there next to it, you can easily see the whole conversation at once. No opening or closing individual emails, no wasted screen real estate with endless headers and previous emails embedded, etc. And yet, Facebook became a corporate machine that in many ways turned against many of its users, attempting to control their speech, censoring them, shutting down posts that AI algorithms incorrectly identify as spam or otherwise problematic, shadowbanning people and groups, etc., so a sizeable portion of the population is mistreated, violated and upset about it. While it is less of a problem for non-controversial content focused on plants and gardening, there's no getting around the fact that any organization that relies on Facebook for its communication system is beholden to a corporate agenda, and there is no guarantee that platform-wide AI algorithms won't cause problems with no recourse. Facebook works well for mainstream thinkers, who don't see any problem with shutting down alternative thought, so many people will not see what I've just described as a genuine problem, but it really is. A Facebook group would only consist of the subset of people who agree with the ideology of the platform owners, or at least willing to tolerate a social environment controlled by that ideology (and not by actual people, but by programmed bots without any accountability). So that leaves independently managed forums that are wholly under the control of the owners. The question is how well-designed is the technology for the users, and the second question is how to keep PBS in people's awareness. So I think what I've seen other forums do is provide some reminders with links to the forum in email. Not every post, but if someone replies to your post, you see a notification in email. Or maybe an occasional email with some links to posts that have been recently popular. I admit I've been slow to migrate to the forum, but having reminders of the exciting posts there would help with that. Gordon _______________________________________________ pbs mailing list pbs@lists.pacificbulbsociety.net http://lists.pacificbulbsociety.net/cgi-bin/… Unsubscribe: <mailto:pbs-unsubscribe@lists.pacificbulbsociety.net> PBS Forum https://…