On Aug 20, 2025, at 11:44 PM, steve ulrich via NANOG <nanog@lists.nanog.org> wrote:
the lindy effect for email is particularly strong in some communities. NANOG seems to be one of them.
I think that for some of us, e-mail was the original version of IM, as it was/is the common cross-systems way to communicate with each other. I was horrified when I was forced to sign up for an AIM account with one company but grew to be ok with it as a way to reach colleagues. If you were always online, you could have a bot manage your presence on IRC to maintain history and other elements, but these days you take something like Slack/Discord and whatnot and it’s very much like that but “in the cloud” as a service vs having to each run your own bot. It also doesn’t have the annoying/confusing IETF-type stuff that was in the Jabber protocol where you could have per-device presences that are different and lost messages because they sent something to a machine or device that won’t be online for a few days. Now with Zoom, Slack, MS Teams, Webex(Teams/Spark), etc I’m back in the world where I used to have a common client like Adium that aggregated it all together and don’t have that option really these days. Ideally the services would work on some sort of federation/interop but there’s not a lot of motivation/justification for that. - Jared