Online discussion fora
Dec. 29th, 2019 02:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mtbcI rather like learning new things and having my mind changed. Unfortunately, my journal entry here last Fall about open drug-dealing online is not surprising: most newsgroups have been far more noise than signal for many years now, maybe a couple of decades indeed, though good questions would probably still draw useful answers on comp.theory despite the usual drivel that fills it.
GROGGS (arising from members of the University of Cambridge) is decreasingly a worthwhile forum. It invites single-threaded discussion with each contribution being limited in length. Its heyday was probably thirty years ago; the current incarnation has now dwindled to having maybe three regulars and is slated to be shut down in a few months' time.
The Gale instant messaging system (apparently largely arising from members of the California Institute of Technology) also appears to be rather past its prime: its website no longer seems to exist and some of the previous users have decamped to the free version of the Slack messaging system. I tolerate Slack mostly because I must for work anyway; similarly work's the reason I have a Google account.
I am probably something of an anachronism in seeking discussion in which I can fully participate using open-source software from the text console. I am looking for something a little less real-time than IRC (which at least still has users), more the kind of thing permitting a few sentences at once that can still be usefully picked up hours later. GROGGS is great for that. Gale has (had) useful organizational aspects in how one could multi-post into ad-hoc hierarchies (painfully absent from Slack) while adding affect and suchlike.
My own personal computing plans for the New Year may rather enable a messaging system that borrows what I like most from others but that smells rather like reinventing a technological wheel to address a social need. Still, something Internet-based is useful for getting a first-hand perspective from wide afield and barriers to entry may be key (today is September 9,616th 1993). I should check how bofhnet is doing.
GROGGS (arising from members of the University of Cambridge) is decreasingly a worthwhile forum. It invites single-threaded discussion with each contribution being limited in length. Its heyday was probably thirty years ago; the current incarnation has now dwindled to having maybe three regulars and is slated to be shut down in a few months' time.
The Gale instant messaging system (apparently largely arising from members of the California Institute of Technology) also appears to be rather past its prime: its website no longer seems to exist and some of the previous users have decamped to the free version of the Slack messaging system. I tolerate Slack mostly because I must for work anyway; similarly work's the reason I have a Google account.
I am probably something of an anachronism in seeking discussion in which I can fully participate using open-source software from the text console. I am looking for something a little less real-time than IRC (which at least still has users), more the kind of thing permitting a few sentences at once that can still be usefully picked up hours later. GROGGS is great for that. Gale has (had) useful organizational aspects in how one could multi-post into ad-hoc hierarchies (painfully absent from Slack) while adding affect and suchlike.
My own personal computing plans for the New Year may rather enable a messaging system that borrows what I like most from others but that smells rather like reinventing a technological wheel to address a social need. Still, something Internet-based is useful for getting a first-hand perspective from wide afield and barriers to entry may be key (today is September 9,616th 1993). I should check how bofhnet is doing.
