Henry Bent writes:
Now, I find that there is a fragmentation happening. There are
those of us
who still cling to mailing lists - like this one! - and those
who are
willing to navigate the realms of increasingly compartmentalized
other
forms of community, Discord included. The fact that there is not
a
recognized central repository of unpaid support for a product,
like
sun-managers, I find to be frustrating.
i basically agree. i won't dwell on this too much further because
i recognise that i'm going off-topic, list-wise, but:
i think part of the problem is related to different people having
different preferences around the interfaces they want/need for
discussions. What's happened is that - for reasons i feel are
typically due to a lock-in-oriented business model - many
discussion systems don't provide different interfaces/'views' to
the same underlying discussions. Which results in one community on
platform X, another community on platform Y, another community on
platform Z Whereas, for example, the 'Rocksolid Light'
BBS/forum software provides a Web-based interface to an underlying
NNTP-based system, such that people can use their NNTP clients to
engage in forum discussions. i wish this sort of approach was more
common.
Alexis.