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

Wed Mar 24 15:08:19 UTC 2021

Chiming in as a somewhat-younger network engineer here (19) - I think that
Discord should be more widely considered and approved as an option across
the board here. I’m active on mailing lists, and while they work, at the
end of the day I’d much rather be using an app like Discord, and I know
this is true for a lot of the next generation of net engineers.

The costs (main one is federation/lock-in?) outweigh the benefits entirely:
- Clear and organized channels of communication
- Threads (coming soon, which will help a lot for communities like NANOG)
- Moderation bots
- Roles that allow people interested in certain topics to join the channels
they care about

In terms of platform lock-in; I know some of the higher up team there
pretty well and I know they’d welcome us with open arms and be happy to
answer any questions or solve issues we’re having. There are also bots that
allow you to export entire channel histories live or for archive.

Phin

On Wed, Mar 24, 2021 at 2:54 PM Robert Kisteleki <robert at ripe.net> wrote:

> >> [...]
> >> 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
>
>
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