I intended to ask about something touch more specifically? Evan, I freely own that my access to Linux development tends to come from Debian , where I have been a list member for well a very long time..mailing list by the way smiles. you indicate that "most people" have whatsap..spelling, that reddit and discord manage exchanges better. this is a Linux users group. can you please share the specific third party Linux tools from the command line, the most basic of Linux alloing for access to all these services? Not being provocative, simply want to understand since my own communication doors state that Linux is not supported by any of these services at all. I wrote of open source dedication, in my other post. Now I just want examples of how a person, using Linux at the most basic level, can reach these services. Cheers, Karen On Wed, 11 Sep 2024, ac wrote:

On Tue, 10 Sep 2024 13:40:23 -0400 Evan Leibovitch via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote: <snip>

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I see nothing in email (whether in Google Groups, groups.io or a conventional list like GTALUG's) that isn't functionally done better on Reddit (which allows people to "upvote" the most useful contributions) or Discord (which includes streaming and virtual ad-hoc meetings) or WhatsApp (which is super simple and most people have it anyway). All three of these are free of cost to join or start a group of as many people as you can gather. Discord also supports Markdown formatting which is easier to do than the HTML in most emails.

You're right, it is about the audience.

I am over 40 and I use discord and read reddit each and every day...

BUT, in the groups, specially the larger one's it is not easy to read/scan each and every post, more so, when, like in email, the thread devolves from Google being listed for abuse TO where do I think Glug chat should migrate to... I usually avoid even reading threads with many replies as I have no clue who would post anything useful, where in each reply (what I would find useful, not the 'crowd' - I read upvoted drivel many times each day and every times this happens I am sure I lose a braincell and seriously consider leaving whatever platform.

In fact, if I had no interest in spam/abuse and email and only scanned the first post in this thread, I would not be even reading any of this on other platforms.

I have also had this same discussion, in a few formats and it always ends the same way... (with everyone doing whatever they want to do :) )

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As I said, this is a generational issue.

hmm, maybe you are right, but maybe not for the reasons you think? I recall my first 'smartphone' a Nokia brick, but I could ssh into my servers (the Nokia had a shell) I could do IRC and so many things mobile. I also recall using my own first self written App, 2008? (three years after selling the Linux distro I made) App's were so cool, and surely now email would become useless. Point I am trying to make is that I used to be one of the charge leaders on 'email is now finally dead' :)

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Email works great for people over 40, because it's comfortable and they grew up with it.

Maybe you are right. maybe email is also now comfortable for me. I did not grow up with it though. I used IRC way before using email. Email always seemed to 'clunky' and just too much :)

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For younger people who grew up with smartphones and apps it's a very different story.

maybe. but it does not mean that technically one should promote mobile tech.

we only now know that small kids should not have smartphones. we only now know about myopia and so many many other harmful effects of where tech has taken humanity. We will also still be paying that Invoice.

I could also argue that maybe younger people, Gen A for example, is not even going to use discord or reddit. They struggle to focus and/or read anything over 120 characters. (In stating this, I am looking at actual eye tracking data and analytic data) - When comparing data Gen X and Millenials have the longest attention spans. imo, discord users are, on average, younger than reddit users. Much more still needs to be known, but the foundations expose a trend.

You should think about what this means?

also, to add : The 'upvote' idea, the 'like' idea and the 'herd' has advantages, but as it turns out, has more disadvantages.

this email has no "like' 'subscribe' 'upvote' 'downvote' and you have to truly think about who the person is writing whatever and, if you have the attention span, you have to really focus to understand what is being said :)

sure, hindsight is perfect. but even in knowing something, like planetary change is going to extinct us faster, this does not change anything.

maybe we are evolving ourselves into extinction as we are truly disgusted at our very nature and the herd is just the herd.

and, btw, as there are useful things in the bottom post, I have left it intact, for the record, email allows me to reply inline, snip stuff and allsorts of other things which, depending on the platform, is either impossible, or just too much of an effort and just to hard to do...

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On Tue, Sep 10, 2024 at 11:44 AM Karen Lewellen <klewellen@shellworld.net> wrote:

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As a counter to this idea I offer up groups.io. www.groups.io A location where email not only allows for exchange interaction and communication, but often a great deal of community building as well. especially for folks who wisely wish to avoid the minefield that is Facebook and so forth. Perhaps? it is less about how email may be declining generally, and more about how, in your personal experience, email is less important? I could have listed google groups, and freelists in the place of groups.io, with comparative results. Perhaps its more about the audience? Cheers, Karen

On Tue, 10 Sep 2024, Evan Leibovitch via talk wrote:

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On Tue, Sep 10, 2024 at 4:56 AM ac via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:

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I read in a thread here recently that email is dead,

That would be me. Or something close to what I said.

I never said email was dead, but rather it's evolved in a way that makes it ever less useful ... just like postal mail.

Email, like postal mail, is mainly these days for - Flyers and advertising - government, business and legal communications

None of these uses is really interactive, at most they're occasionally transactional (ie, providing stimulus for me to do something that often itself does not require mail in response).

The one benefit of postal mail that is not shared by its electronic counterpart is the ability to send and receive parcels; the consequences of my doing e-commerce in a way that has zero to do with mail of any kind.

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the one unique benefit of email is that its addresses provide a unique identifier that can be used to create (and optionally authenticate) unrelated online accounts.

I have been hearing that same thing for 30? years now and always for

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different reasons. But volumes of actual transactional email has seen exponential growth, year on year, with not even a hint of any decline in the growth itself.

For most email these days, "transactional" is an aspiration. Most have response rates of single digits at best.

Sure, my spam filter is busier than ever ... but the signal-to-noise ratio has plummeted. Same with postal mail. If it wasn't for flyer mail Canada Post would be in even more of a financial hole than it now is. Email marketing does not suffer quite the same financial fate as postal mail because costs are shared between sender and receiver.

In a previous life I was on the other side of this. I was involved in choosing a bulk-mailing vendor and launching numerous bulk email campaigns, for newsletters and announcements. (FWIW, the vendor we ended up using was Moosend, based in London and India -- email doesn't care about domestic versus international rates.) It was cheap, but we never expected more

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low-single-digit percentage of recipients even opening what we sent, let alone responding by (say) going to the org's website. Providing strategy to circumvent RBLs and spam filters has become a cottage industry of its own.

What interactive functions of email still exist -- mainly the social ones, like personal mail and forums such as this -- are mostly the artifacts of the generation that grew up on it. Just like I still receive birthday cards in the post, but only from relatives older than me.

These services may very well never die. But both email and non-parcel

And than post

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are destined to continue their ever-further descent into pure nuisance.

- Evan