[jdally987]

Nah that’s more like messaging platforms. IRC, Telegram, matrix, etc.

I was thinking about this yesterday actually. I’ve been having a lot of questions about this new linux distro I’ve been using, and piling them on in the IRC channel, but if no one answers it right away it gets buried by the next message after me. So I kept re-asking it for multiple days before realizing, you know what if this is something that only even a few people might know how to help me with, I should probably leave it to “steep” on a proper Discourse topic, or reddit thread, or stackoverflow question or whatever. I hadn’t done that because I was just super impatient and knew it might be a good half a day or 2 or 3 days before I get a reply, but it’s much more likely to get one at all than in the IRC, where someone butting in with a meme or something right after me means my question might as well be nonexistent in the conversation stream.

[fastball]

Forums are still closer to talking than they are to a book.

It's just that the internet allows them to be async conversations. A forum is fairly equivalent to email, just usually more public than email and the underlying infrastructure isn't federated.

[the_af]

Agreed. But like email, I expect forum threads/posts to stay indefinitely and be searchable, until I explicitly delete them.

Email is a persistent conversation which gets archived indefinitely, not an ephemeral one like talking with our mouths.

[nine_k]

Your personal email may be retained indefinitely.

Corporate email (and IM, etc) gets purged pretty quickly, within 2-3 years, unless you save a particular message / thread explicitly.

[BlueTemplar]

Aren't they worried about losing most of the knowledge of the context of decisions made?

[holler]

Im working on a new topical discussion site just for cases like this, where each post has an irc-like chat built in, is open, and can be shared by url. https://sqwok.im