Re: New lua-l hosted at Google Groups

[Tom Sutcliffe <tomsci@...>]

> On 12 Dec 2023, at 00:48, Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo <lhf@tecgraf.puc-rio.br> wrote:
> 
> I can confirm that you can join the new lua-l without a Google account.
> 
> To subscribe to lua-l@googlegroups.com, send an empty email to
> lua-l+subscribe@googlegroups.com and reply to their reply.

I tried that yesterday, received no reply to the email I sent (from an iCloud address so should be as legit-looking as they come).

I have zero confidence that Google is a safe long-term harbour for _anything_, https://killedbygoogle.com/ lists 293 products after all. I sympathise with the situation, and I don't have any expertise in this area to contribute I'm afraid, but I would never recommend to anyone that anything they have that they care about should be migrated _to_ a Google service. Not in 2023. They have a proven track record of not caring about anything that isn't advertising or The Next Big Thing, providing terrible support to users having problems, and killing any product no matter how useful if they fail to monetise it sufficiently and/or get bored with it. Sure there are some exceptions and it's a topic that can be debated endlessly, but short answer is I wouldn't put my trust in Google Groups. Today it doesn't work without a Google account, can anyone say with any certainty what else might not work tomorrow?

Personally I really liked the fact that lua-l was "old school" and just worked over email. It's a tried and tested approach and seems to work nicely for this sort of thing. I really hope a replacement mailing list service can be found.

> On Dec 12, 2023 at 20:13 +0300, Hisham <h@hisham.hm>, wrote:
> 
> Sad to see another step in the googleification of the internet and the
> slow erosion of email, but there's nothing I can do on my end, other
> than perhaps belatedly echo the suggestion of freelists.org. I have
> used it for hosting the htop mailing list for many years. And yes, I
> fully realize what I means that I'm writing this from a GMail web
> client.
> 
> I haven't been active here on the list, but lua-l is the last mailing
> list I still follow semi-regularly. I'll follow along to Google Groups
> or wherever it gets migrated to next.
> 
> From this long-time user of lua-l, I also want to thank everyone at
> Pepperfish for hosting it for so long. And especially, I want to thank
> to the Lua Team for managing this community so well over the years and
> continuing to look after it. This is a nice little corner of the
> internet, and thanks to your efforts I'm sure it will continue to be,
> whoever the new landlords are.

+1 to all of those points!

Tom