OT: Re: Younger generations preferring social media(esque) interactions.

Wed Mar 24 14:52:51 UTC 2021

>> [...]
>> Keeping it simple so you can reach your result faster and most 
>> efficiently is often understood more by the kids than us geezers. 
>> While we are fighting about whether Discourse or Mailman are 
>> appropriate, the kids have probably dumped both and found something 
>> that gets them to the promised land 5 seconds after they install the app.
> 
> ...only to end up with yet another account at yet another data mining 
> (future) monopolist butchering standards... I'm all for moving with the 
> flow and embrace new things as long as it's based on open standards, 
> open protocols, does not lock people in to a specific platform, etc., is 
> decentralised and federated and gives users the choice (e.g. choice of 
> MUA / MTA, or XMPP client, etc.). The trend to force everything to 
> web-based or only THAT particular app is a fundamental step backwards 
> towards significant less of choice on the internet.
> 
> To just give in (or up) and say, well, that's what the youngsters now 
> prefer is to move even more towards a world dominated by a few global 
> monopolistic players who don't give a darn about open standards, open 
> protocols, not locking people in, decentralisation and fedaration...
> And youngsters - as with anything in life - need to be educated and made 
> aware of that (spoken as a former teacher).
> 
> Sec

(Excuses for not being a "real NANO", but have strong ties.)

I would not use the same strong words, but I agree with this in spirit.

As of today, email is the ultimate standard that helps me manage my 
relations in a similar manner to almost all of the professional 
communities I'm interested in (*). I do observe that multiple of them 
have proposals to move on to something else, in many cases to walled 
gardens. This bears a number of risks towards participation and keeping 
(long term) history.

As for participation: I'm concerned that for me to keep up being 
involved in these communities, I'd have to engage an ever increasing 
number of (proprietary) platforms *all of which are incompatible with 
each other*. Different communities adopt different solutions, so the 
list started to include FB, github, discord, mattermost, etc. and will 
soon include signal, telegram, and everything else in between. A common 
denominator, being almost always email, is badly needed. And exists. 
OTOH once this becomes unbearable, I *will* stop participating in some. 
As for NANOG, such a move will surely make otherwise valuable members 
tune out?

As for keeping history: there's surely a break when the whole community 
is moved to a new platform. If that ever happens again, there's another 
discontinuity. This is only worse with proprietary platforms where 
exporting / backing up history for long term preservation is likely 
hard, if not entirely impossible.

All in all, I'm happier if email continues to be the backbone of 
communication here.

Robert

(*) sadly, this is already not entirely true