Andrew McGlashan, thanks for asking some good questions! I agree that at the very least the direct link should also be in the announcement. The reason for using a link-shortener is basically accuracy and convenience. I personally load the meeting both on my phone and my laptop. On the phone, I can simply open the browser and type 'bit.ly / linuxmeeting' without needing to search for the link in the Email app, etc. It helps me choose a particular browser on the phone, instead of clicking a link which may open the link in a different browser. I also don't like the idea of copying a link and pasting it in the browser since all apps have access to the clipboard and trust me they all log everything you copy all the time. In this particular case, it helps with removing ambiguity. We had a meeting a while ago with a different link under meet.glasswings.com.au and some people actually used the wrong link where nothing was happening. To address your concerns about tracking, I personally never thought there would be an issue with that. What I understand is that the bit.ly website will know you have visited this link. Is there any other downside besides that I am not aware of? Ideally, we will be using our own link-shortner under luv.asn.au. Something I had mentioned before in previous meetings. There was also a third reason for using bit.ly. Consistency. I assumed it would allow me to update the link for the future meetings and hence keep it consistent for our members but it doesn't seem to allow me to do that. For now, I agree that it is important to give people the option to use the actual link directly, so in the future I will include both the direct link and the short link.
Regarding the meetup being a pripriotry platform, I agree that it is not the ideal solution however, our use of Meetup is solely for advertising our events and helping new members discover us. Some other groups are using meetup.com as their primary base and I agree with you that that is not a good idea. For us, our base is our website which uses open source software. And our events, so far has been also using open source software which some of them we also own the infrastructure they run on. So, in short, meetup.com has served us very well so helping new members finding us. It would definitely be great to advertise our events on platforms that have audience and are not propriotary. I don't personally know any. This all said, we can always try new ways of doing things for the upcoming events. So, suggestions and critisims are always welcome! + Alexar On Tue, Jun 1, 2021 at 11:17 PM Andrew Pam via luv-main <[email protected]> wrote: > On 1/6/21 10:38 pm, Andrew McGlashan via luv-main wrote: > > Mobilizon features most of what Meetup has to offer, and it > > is completely free and owned typically by individuals and small > > communities, that won't exploit you. > > We set up a LUV Mobilizon server in 2018 and demonstrated it to the > members at a LUV meeting, but unfortunately few members seemed very > motivated to actually use it. > > Cheers, > andrew > -- > mailto:[email protected] Andrew Pam > https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics > https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings > _______________________________________________ > luv-main mailing list -- [email protected] > To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected] > -- [image: image.jpg] *Alexar Pendashteh* technologist / social entrepreneur https://calendly.com/alexar/ https://github.com/pendashteh
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