Hi everyone,
Completely biased 2 cents:
I've been co-running LURK with Alex, and in the past years we've had
several off-list exchanges about the platform itself.
Generally speaking, like some have already pointed out, it's good to
acknowledge that email/forum are not in competition with chat services.
They really serve different purposes and offer different modes of
synchronicity, and as a result will be both accommodating and favouring
different types of discussions. One could also add Twitter/Mastodon in
the mix, or simply extend the argument to virtually any platform. In
practice, it's really not uncommon to see communities articulated around
several communication infrastructures, mailing lists, web forums, IRC,
etc. I think it's healthy and handy.
One point however that I find very important, is that this discussion
should not just limit itself to a raw comparaison of features between
platform X and Y. I think that most people on LURK, and not just the
livecode group, have a certain sensibility towards the ownership and
control over their tools and their practice. A discussion platform is no
different because it will have a big role in shaping the discourse and
culture of an online community.
I'm personally attached to LURK, as in the idea of running a relatively
autonomous platform for things I care about, not so much because of the
software it uses, but because it is consistent with ideas of empowerment
and cultural diversity, and yet is too often an overlooked component in
the structuring of communities of practice.
Practically, it's true that's it's a pain to maintain, but I think that
it's not just an email server maintenance issue. Personally I find the
real burden being the maintenance of GroupServer, and would love to find
an alternative, and *also* we could really do with an extra root or two
on the server side.
Regarding the Slack/Gitter issue, I just want to point out that there is
a fully working XMPP server running on LURK for quite a while now, and
has been the home of a couple dozens users and a bunch of chat rooms.
Some LURK users use both the groups and XMPP chats, and generally
speaking it works super well. It does require some effort to get it
running as it is definitively not as sleek and user friendly as modern
chat systems, but it works really well. Just like I said above, some of
us think that questions of platform politics and dogfooding are very
important, and was after all the main reason why we started LURK.
a.
--
https://bleu255.com/~aymeric
--
Read the whole topic here: livecode:
http://lurk.org/r/topic/20hzAtNu3zTiWqXCbigvmM
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Received on Wed Jan 03 2018 - 21:02:54 GMT