secluded/content/bookclub.md

title	description	date	draft	rss_only	cover	type
Book club	Low-commitment book club over plaintext mailing lists	2024-06-26T18:46:34-04:00	false	false	./cover.png	generic

This is a mailing list-based book club co-organised by myself and Jake Bauer. We intend to follow much of how Phil Eaton runs his book clubs, albeit with slight tweaks.

• Anyone can join whether or not they intend to participate; lurkers are welcome!
• We'll read some amount of the current book each week, then a discussion leader will start a new thread over the weekend that anyone can reply to.
• Each book gets a new mailing list, so briefly dropping out if you're not interested in the next book is as easy as not subscribing to that list.
• Once the group decides on the next book, Amolith or Jake will post it to the announcements list.
• We'll try to limit the amount of reading each week to something a fairly busy person can keep up with.

Joining

• Subscribe to the low-volume announcement list by sending an email to ~amolith/book-club-announce+subscribe@lists.sr.ht. No human will see the email, so the body and subject can contain anything.
  • Replace +subscribe with +unsubscribe to unsubscribe.
• If you intend to participate, please read over SourceHut's mailing list etiquette page, then subscribe to the book's list (below) the same way as the announcement list.
  • ~amolith/book-club-how-to-do-nothing+subscribe@lists.sr.ht
    We'll try to keep this up-to-date.

Public archives

• book-club-announce: Book club announcements—new lists, dates, etc.
• book-club-how-to-do-nothing: How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, by Jenny Odell (Wikipedia)

Differences between this and Phil's book club

We use lists.sr.ht instead of Google Groups, which does give us access to the finer permissions Phil mentioned were missing from Google Groups. Anyone can browse and reply to existing threads but neither create new threads nor moderate. Discussion leaders can browse, reply, and create threads, but not moderate. For now, Amolith and Jake are the only ones with full access to all the lists, though we'll appoint additional moderators should they become necessary.

We don't have access to any kind of metrics beyond the number of replies to threads. SourceHut doesn't expose any information about subscribers or even give us a subscriber count.