Re: free collaborative tools for low BW and losy connections

[Jay Farrell via NANOG <nanog () nanog org>]

On Mon, Mar 30, 2020 at 8:56 AM Rich Kulawiec <rsk () gsp org> wrote:

> On Mon, Mar 30, 2020 at 06:30:16AM -0500, Joe Greco wrote:
> > Actual text traffic has been slowly dying off for years as webforums
> > have matured and become a better choice of technology for nontechnical
> > end users on high speed Internet connections.
>
> My view is that the move to web forums is a huge downgrade.  Mailing lists
> are vastly superior.

Are web forums even still much of a thing in recent years? My own
experience in several non-networking realms, where I was active in a number
of web-based forums, is that over the past 4 or 5 years facebook groups,
both public and private, have siphoned off the bulk of the former
discussion traffic of once-thriving web forums, with few exceptions. Talk
about a huge downgrade. While facebook's groups allow for virtually
unlimited image uploads, the are extremely lacking in features such as
threaded discussion and searching. I grudgingly live in a number of
facebook groups, including one I admin, but only because all the people I
know from usenet, and then later in forums, have migrated to facebook
groups. One popular city-based discussion group withered away from hundreds
of posts and comments daily to sometimes several days with NO comments at
all. Network effect is in full effect.