If Scott turned this off tomorrow, I don't think I have more than a dozen people's current contact info. And for the ones I do have, a mailing list wouldn't be the same.

Might be better in some ways, worse in others, but this little community has lasted a *long time* in basically this form. I wouldn't want to take an unnecessary bet it would survive in a different form.

So long as we're relying on *someone* maintaining the system, we depend on a benefactor. We're mostly tech geeks. Probably half of us could figure out how to host off-the-shelf forum software if Scott wanted to bow out. For other groups, they rely on a commercial solution.

There are a couple groups I follow on Facebook. Not because it's Facebook, but because that's where the people meet. Some of those have thousands of members, with several hundred fairly regular contributors.

*One* of them has a secondary channel that they control. Because it's a commercial product user group, and the manufacturer has it's own forum.

Yes, the internet makes it possible for "anyone" to communicate with "anyone". But once that scales up to thousands of regular users, there needs to be professional support.