am i making my peace with discord?
this will go down on your permanent record … (or not)
if you’re in tech, you’re on a grip of slacks, discords, google chats, and [INSERT-CHAT-PLATFORM-HERE] not to mention innumerable mailing lists. it’s super tiresome and i’m sure that you’ve spent hours tweaking your notifications so that you don’t get bothered at all hours of the day and night.
there’s a routine check of the various fora that we all end up doing to make sure that we haven’t missed something. invariably, i have.
a couple of years ago, slack, who was purchased by salesforce, was forced to succumb to the pressures of late stage capitalism and started to put a 90 day retention limit on the free tier of slacks. this is a reasonable thing to do, i mean they’re building and maintaining a product that has very real infrastructure costs. the freemium model has worked well. we all really like slack for its clever integration, customization capabilities, vibe, etc. not a day goes by at $DAYJOB where we don’t all bemoan the fact that we’re not on slack. but it’s spendy and google chat is, well … good enough.
this move to putting things older than 90 days behind a wall was a clever move commercially. unfortunately, it was kind of the death knell for a lot of the open source projects or fora where things were being discussed and folks weren’t able to shell out for the non-profit or commercial rates. suddenly, all sorts of useful history and various bits of info were gone. lost (kind of) to the ephemera of the SFDC archival machinery.
that’s a lot of institutional knowledge that poof! disappeared.
which brings me to NANOG…
afaict, there’s never been a public NANOG slack, but there’s been a mailing list for well … nearly the entirety of the commercial internet. there are a lot of graybeards on it and we’re trying to bring in the next generation of networkers into the fold and they don’t seem as inclined to interact on the mailing list time cycles. that’s fair, times are changing and we’re all more or less wired for an IRC/IM style interaction. this does however, mean that we need to make our collective peace with a cloud-based messaging service and we’ll be opening ourselves up to the concomitant risks associated with the ever changing service landscape. NANOG chose discord as the platform and it’s been rolled out of a couple of meetings now.
there are nice things here. there are in-meeting notification re: who’s coming up, reminders to fill out the surveys. live discussion of the talks underway, etc. this is slick stuff and i broadly welcome it. there even appears to be reasonably powerful moderation capabilities that the moderation committee can use to enforce adult-acting behaviors.
the good news is there does seem to be more durable traction. between meetings folks seem to be picking up on using it. i have a separate discord browser app that logs into the range of discords that i apparently need to be a member of, (for reasons) and things work pretty smoothly. there is about as much activity there as there is on the mailing list and the interface is snazzy. albeit a touch confusing.
still … in the back of my head i’m constantly waiting for that other shoe to drop. when will discord change the terms of their service? will we be forced to charge folks for accessing the discord server? if so, can we build this into the NANOG member fee structure?
what happens when discord is bought up by some other company so the investors and the VCs can get their liquidity event? will we be force to pack our community up so that we can keep the discussion rolling?