New Mailing Lists for Sandstorm.org

[Jacob Weisz]

Several of us have long talked about how to get away from Google Groups and when to do so. Google has not gotten better at managing spam both in terms of junk registrations and emails, as well as recently flagging one of our core community member's posts as spam more than once, despite them being here for several years. There's also the fundamental risk Google shutters or substantially alters Groups, and of course, it always seems a bit odd to ask users of a privacy-centered project to sign up with Google.

I've recently been experimenting with groups.io, a service founded by the original developer of Yahoo! Groups before it was sold to them, and I think it's a really solid platform with a very generous free tier and feature set. The service has been running since 2014 and the founder started making mailing list software in 1998, so the likelihood of stability and longevity here seems pretty high. It has some pleasant features on their site, but like any good traditional mailing list software, can handle pretty much everything you can want entirely over email.

We also do not want to ever just lift the sandstorm-dev mailing list's subscribers, because all of you who have opted into this list did so presumably under Kenton or Sandstorm.io, not our community-run organization. And there have been questions about how many people either are hesitant to join or post to a "dev" list if they are not doing dev work. So it makes sense to split this list into a "user" group for people who use and have questions or need help with Sandstorm, and a "dev" group for people who hack on and build apps for and want to talk about code for Sandstorm. Feel free to join both, or just one if you are interested in a few less emails.

To that end, I've set up a few new groups:

https://groups.io/g/sandstorm-user-group - For community and project announcements, general discussion, and support

https://groups.io/g/sandstorm-dev-group - For discussion of app and platform development

Finally, I've set up a "business users" group, which is semi-private, to discuss how Sandstorm can meet enterprise needs and hopefully how the Sandstorm project can develop a healthy relationship with business users while remaining a very non-profit, very open source outlook. If you use Sandstorm in an enterprise environment, or are building a business around Sandstorm, please email me for an invitation.

Note that while there are still a lot of active users here, and not as many active users in these groups, we may end up still posting here or in some cases duplicating posts between the old and new lists.

--
Jacob Weisz
goo...@jacobweisz.com

[Tim McCormack]

On Mon, 15 Apr 2024 14:56:04 -0500, 'Jacob Weisz' via Sandstorm Development wrote:
> I've recently been experimenting with groups.io, a service founded by the original developer of Yahoo! Groups before it was sold to them, and I think it's a really solid platform with a very generous free tier and feature set. The service has been running since 2014 and the founder started making mailing list software in 1998, so the likelihood of stability and longevity here seems pretty high. It has some pleasant features on their site, but like any good traditional mailing list software, can handle pretty much everything you can want entirely over email.

I can vouch for groups.io -- I run our neighborhood's mailing list
there. I don't use any fancy features, but I do upgrade and then
downgrade the membership once a year in order to send some money their
way.

I will add one note of caution: Adding subgroups is a permanent and
irreversible change, and changes the main address of your group. (I can
give more details of my experience with it for anyone who is
interested.)

- Tim