Amit aur Naseer saahibaan, aadaab 'arz hai.
maiN aap donoN ko ek hi post meN muKhaatib kar rahaa hooN, kyoN ki is mein chand aisi baateN haiN jo aap donoN ahbaab ke mandarja baala Khutoot ke jawaab meN haiN. aur phir yeh bhi k yeh baateN tamaam dostaan-e-ALUP ke liye bhi qaabil-e-Ghaur-o-fikr hoNgi, to inheN ek hi jagah darj karna munaasib hogaa.
1. Google groups par (non-Usenet) alup -- jise
https://groups.google.com/ g / alup (remove whitespaces to visit) par dekha jaa saktaa hai -- us ke muta'alliq aap saahibaan ko pesh aayi diqqatoN aur mushkilaat ke liye maiN zimmeh.daar hooN aur ma'azirat Khwaah bhi. jaisaa maiN ne upar Zoya saahiba ki post pe likhe apne jawaab meN 'arz kiya hai, kuchh group settings ke Theek na hone ki wajh se aap log mazkoora group ko DhooNDhne aur use subscribe karne se qaasir rahe. ab ek baar phir koshish kar leN -- the settings should be open enough to allow that now.
2. FB par jo ALUP group banaaya gayaa hai, us ke aap donoN hi member haiN, mere Khayaal meN aap donoN ko us ke ist'emaal meN kisi Khaar pareshaani se guzarna naheeN paRaa hai. agar maiN Ghalati par hooN, to mujhe zaroor Khabar kareN. I will try to fix that ASAP.
3. Discord -- this is a platform I have so far stayed away from, while I am aware of its existence, I have not had a chance to learn/use it for any reason whatsoever. Honestly, between Facebook (where I spend *way too much* time!), Slack (where I need to be for other reasons), email (work and personal), WhatsApp (personal), SMS/Text/video calls (personal) and things like Skype, Zoom and Google meet (work and personal), I really haven't had a need to investigate more interpersonal interaction software solutions, and no motivation to look into them even to just educate myself. That said, if the collective decision of this group is to move to the Discord server you've set up, I will gladly follow.
4. Why are there only 44 members of the ALUP @ FB group?
The reason is that it was never advertised with any level of deliberate intent or seriousness. (For that matter, alup @
googlegroups.com was also not advertised and it has exactly ZERO members other than me!) These alternatives were created at a time in the past when we had suddenly started to see a lot of spam messages showing up on Google Usenet groups, and I thought it might be useful to have an alternative available if at all ALUPers wished to voluntarily move elsewhere. However, at no time was there a need as there is now (Google didn't decide to "kill" of their Usenet groups interface.)
5. The remainder of this message is long (I hope ALUPers will excuse me for my verbosity), but I felt it necessary to post this to respond to some points that have been made since my initial post in this thread. I am delighted to see that a bit of discussion has occurred (as I had hopefully expected) between the alup @ googlegroups alternative ("option 2" in my note) and ALUP at Facebook ("option 3"). I believe that listing a few more pros and cons of the two is in order here. Of course these are as I see them.
alup @ googlegroups:
Advantages:
1. Familiar interface, everyone who has been on Usenet ALUP knows how to get to Google Groups and interact there.
2. The same accounts can be used to read/post ensuring continuation of the same level (such as it might have been) of privacy, and anonymity.
3. Makes possible fully-featured threaded discussions on topics, just as we have on Usenet. This is a big one for me personally.
4. Google search capabilities can be utilized for looking up and retrieving old messages many many years after the fact.
Disadvantages:
1. NOT mobile-friendly. Very laptop/desktop-centric. This is a big one for me personally.
The full Google groups reading and posting experience is only available via the "desktop site" and is extremely unfriendly to phone or tablet devices. Over the ast several years, primary online engagement has moved to handheld devices, and anything that's "desktop-only" is liable to limit engagement.
2. Primarily "text-only". This is a big one for me personally too.
I increasingly find people sending, receiving, and engaging with more modern media like photos, videos, files, PDFs, and other non-text media. For example, sharing videos of sh'ora reciting their own verse. These are not easy to share or disseminate over the Google groups interface. Some alternatives ARE available -- for example, you can opt to receive all group messages in your inbox as emails, and then you can send those non-text media out using your email client. Readers can also do the same (receive all posts as emails). Personally, I don't like to receive these things as email, because I want to keep these things separate.
ALUP group on Facebook:
Advantages:
1. Fully multimedia capable -- if you like text-only, you can do that, if you want to share other things, you can do that too. A big one for me.
2. Very mobile-friendly: phone, tablet, laptop, desktop, ... use any device you like, and you'll get the same features. Another big one for me.
3. A number of us are already on that group.
4. (Facebook gets a bad rap, but) It's my experience that it's possible to set up your account so that you maintain the same level of anonymity as you can maintain at any other online site these days.
Disadvantages:
1. Facebook as a medium is highly polarizing.
People have strong feelings about using Facebook -- they either like it, or hate it. While a lot of us reading this may have FB accounts already, a number of us may be highly disinclined to create an account or to use their account which they already have to interact with ALUPers (e.g., they would like to only use it to contact their close friends and family).
2. Perception of FB as a "privacy violator".
Most often, the hatred/dislike stems from a (mistaken) feeling that Facebook does not make it possible to maintain your privacy and secrecy/anonymity online (this is false, it is possible to prevent others from seeing who you are and also blocking people from contacting or even seeing you. The blocking feature does not exist in Google groups to the best of my knowledge).
3. Poor support for multi-theaded deeply nested discussions. This is a big one for me.
The FB interface is not as advanced as Google Groups or Usenet to allow multiple threads of deeply nested discussions. FB threads are at most 1-level of nesting. That said, most of the time, this is not a hindrance; one learns to grow and adapt.
Left to myself, I would choose the FB alternative because it's the "less evil" of the two options in terms of features and access options. But that's *MY* opinion, and of course, I'm not going to choose anything on anyone else's behalf. The groups are both available for all of you to subscribe to, and to start engaging with each other. THAT is what I hope you'll do. In fact, maybe we can all start using BOTH and see which one gets more engagement, and that will automatically be the one that "wins" (an unfortunate term, but these days, win/lose is all that people seem to care about).
-UVR.