Part of the problem is that there’s really only so much that can be said about Traveller in its base form without rehashing the same discussions from two or three decades ago. Another part of the problem is that technology has moved a lot since the mid 90s, and a lot of what I want to say about or read about Traveller has a lot of value when it is visually supported, and email is really not a good form for that. Particularly when even HTML email is considered sort of a faux pas and embedded images just about forbidden.
For example, when discussing the regina-assiniboia system gravitational gradient, in facebook it’s pretty easy to just insert an image to the post, and here I have to take the trouble of uploading to an image host and then posting that link:
https://i.imgur.com/Raa8ell.png and for archival purposes who knows how long that host will be around.
Or discussing xboat networks and communication speeds across the travellermap setting:
https://i.imgur.com/a3oR1uB.png , or discussing surface features and routes on Regina:
https://i.imgur.com/DKfRkuS.png or making attempts at mapping the constellations in the sky of Earth to the 3I:
https://i.imgur.com/8gYwoQk.png (the arrows representing the approximate direction in the sky of the Wow! signal, compressed to 2 dimensions). A lot of this kind of thing is harder to talk about in text format than it is when there is visual support.
Facebook isn’t great for this because writing math in facebook sucks.
It is a nice thing about email that there is no demand for a real-time or near-real-time response. The flip side of that is conversations take months.
On the plus side of Facebook, Marc Miller is at least somewhat active in the various Traveller groups on facebook, so it's sort of worth having discussions there for the occasional canonical response.
What are the Other Places That Are More Ephemeral, other than Facebook, MeWe and perhaps Reddit?
In the run-up to TravellerCON/USA, I'm seeing ZERO traffic. It didn't used
to be this way, not even when we were having teething pains because of host
changes.
I really don't want to get tied to forums and "Social Networks"; I like to
keep an archive, and I like to be able to download when I'm not at my
computer, and read and respond at my leisure - especially if I'm having
network problems and need to let stuff accumulate until the network
problems are resolved, and still not miss anything. Unlike email and nntp,
Social Networks and Forums simply don't allow that; I essentially have to
be able to participate in real-time or risk missing a lot.
Can we somehow resuscitate the list? Can we possibly arrange feeds or at
least summaries from Those Other Places That Are More Ephemeral?
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