As one of the moderators of Player Piano Talk on Facebook, it's
complementary to MMD.  It's all in-the-moment, fast reactions to
interesting posts while others fade into history.  There is a search
facility, but it's most certainly not the enduring indexed archive
that MMD is, and is not intended to be.

However, as has been said we have attracted a pleasing number of
newcomers who need a basic steer, and have a number of experts who
share their advice.  Some of these debates get mirrored in MMD!

The Facebook debate is courteous and the need for moderation is
minimal.  Facebook's tools deal with posts wholly automatically, none
of the work that Robbie and Jody put in (mostly hidden from readers)
each and every day to MMD.

I suppose that the Facebook generation are more inclined to use it
rather than write to MMD, simply because joining groups is something
they are familiar with doing, while MMD is unfamiliar territory.  We'd
always steer them in its direction. You can see that such groups (there
being equivalents for organs, orchestrions and so on) will take some
chatter traffic from MMD.

Recent tweaks to MMD such as photo links are good because they fill
functional gaps as seen by users of newer social media.  I'd suggest that
further tweaks to MMD should be of modern Facebook-like capabilities,
rather than latter-day implementations of decades-old mailing list
ideas.  The world moves on, even for those looking to keep the old
world of players alive!

Julian Dyer