Riverton
· chat · social media · websites ·
So much happens on WhatsApp, Telegram, and Discord (and other chat platforms), that I'm starting to feel like just giving up on fighting them, and even promoting the idea of ephemeral chat being the place to do everything. Mailing lists are silent, and forums work but only for fairly specific communities. Almost everyone seems to be completely happy with reams of discussion and history being locked up in proprietary websites, so why shouldn't I be too?
I don't like the fact that history is forgotten, that search is rubbish, that threads don't have subjects and can't be continued ad-hoc days or weeks or months later. That attached photos are down-scaled and have their metadata striped. And a dozen other features of these systems.
But I do like the fact that it's possible to talk to people! And that's really what it's all about. So my new approach, I think, is to focus on the ephemerality of chat — it's just like talking to pepole, there's no need or desire to record everything, and anything that's worth recording needs to be transferred to some other place. That last bit is a steep rule for most chat systems, especially those like Slack that try to make you believe that they're the long-term record of your community. But I think it works, especially if some people make it their business to copy relevant stuff to a wiki or other easily-updatable website.
So I'll give up on the mailing lists, and stop feeling worried about the personal and organisational history that's daily being put on the front of a conveyor belt to deletion. I'll not go as far as to join Facebook, but I'll stick with WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord, Slack, Matrix, and IRC groups that I'm part of, and try to free up that part of my brain that gets annoyed about all this stuff.