Facebook has to be the least convenient way this could be hosted
Compared to the rest of the internet, yes. But for the Model 100 people, this is actually the cream of the crop.
Sadly, information in the Model 100 community is notoriously difficult to get to. Well, not fully "difficult." More like "obnoxious."
Most of the good stuff is on old web sites with many broken links, little documentation, and abysmal navigation. I think the main repository is actually the web site of a guy who died years ago and is kept online, but unmaintained and suffering from severe bitrot, by people about to go the same way.
For interactive discussion, the primary source is a mailing list where people ask the same questions over and over and nobody trims their replies, so you might get a message reply that just says "yep" followed by 150 lines of nested quotes. In digest form, it's simply unusable.
So, amazingly, a Facebook post is a thoroughly modern and convenient way for Model 100 enthusiasts to pass information around, compared to all of the other methods they employ.
> Most of the good stuff is on old web sites with many broken links, little documentation, and abysmal navigation. I think the main repository is actually the web site of a guy who died years ago and is kept online, but unmaintained and suffering from severe bitrot, by people about to go the same way.
As long as the site(s) have been grabbed by Internet Archive, I'm not sure that this has to be an issue. (I've noticed that the archive.org 'Wayback machine' will even archive some downloads, albeit it's not something that should be counted on.)
It doesn't "have to," but sadly it is. The internet, like the rest of the world, is not a perfect place. If IA doesn't find a web site before the bitrot sets in, then what? There are huge swaths of the web that are not in IA, and from what I read on HN, IA doesn't have the capacity to archive.
I don't want to speak ill of them because they're doing an amazing job, but the Internet Archive doesn't have everything (especially old, long gone and/or obscure sites), isn't always complete, and often doesn't have things that back in the day that were on FTP sites. Sometimes you get lucky, but I've not had great luck there.
If you're maintaining some repository of information others find useful, please-please-please have a plan to pass it on to a successor caretaker and a notation in your will about your wishes.
I'm well aware of that, sadly. But often, part of "maintaining" a valuable repository of information (especially one that has reached stability and is not seeing ongoing updates) is uploading it to the Archive yourself. The Internet Archive has "trouble" dealing with information in the gigabytes and terabytes (which is why donations to them are valuable) but retrocomputing stuff is not like that.
part of "maintaining" a valuable repository of information... is uploading it to the Archive yourself
The problem is that we're talking about information that started suffering from bitrot before the Internet Archive became a big thing. Or even before the Internet Archive existed. Heck 99.999% of it existed before the internet.
Sure, it would have been great if on May 13, 1996 someone would have uploaded all of the information that there has ever been about the TRS-80 Model 100 to IA, but that didn't happen.
So often in places like HN the answer to flaws is "Well, you should have...," as if that solves the problem, or makes it go away. But it doesn't. It just makes the person writing that look like a jerk who isn't interested in solving problems, but in pointing out the failings of others.
Compared to the rest of the internet, yes. But for the Model 100 people, this is actually the cream of the crop.
Sadly, information in the Model 100 community is notoriously difficult to get to. Well, not fully "difficult." More like "obnoxious."
Most of the good stuff is on old web sites with many broken links, little documentation, and abysmal navigation. I think the main repository is actually the web site of a guy who died years ago and is kept online, but unmaintained and suffering from severe bitrot, by people about to go the same way.
For interactive discussion, the primary source is a mailing list where people ask the same questions over and over and nobody trims their replies, so you might get a message reply that just says "yep" followed by 150 lines of nested quotes. In digest form, it's simply unusable.
So, amazingly, a Facebook post is a thoroughly modern and convenient way for Model 100 enthusiasts to pass information around, compared to all of the other methods they employ.