cool tools: discord

[Joe Corneli]

Hi folks,

With the metaphor of peeragogy as a kind of 'e-sport', I wonder if we should set up a Discord server?  That could be another alternative to Zoom and Jitsi, but would have an integrated chat so it is also an alternative to Keybase and Gitter.  All told it's probably similar to Slack.

Obviously having lots of alternatives isn't always good - yesterday we ended up having 2 simultaneous meetings (my fault, I forgot to update the calendar...).

At the same time we've often gotten something out of trying new things, so I think it's worth a go.

https://discordapp.com/open-source

Furthermore, maybe it's good to get into the places where are services are 'most needed'.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discord_(software)#Controversial_content

Joe

[skreutzer]

Discord is another one of these services, not necessary much special, relatively common for gamer communities (likely replaced the earlier TeamSpeak). Has a web client, and calls too (with audio/screensharing, don't know about cams and recording, but eventually why wouldn't all of them eventually end up supporting all of these). With the web client in Firefox on Ubuntu, voice channels work for me (as always), screenshare is probably only supported via their native clients as Discord seems to haven't bothered yet to bring it to there as well.

[Charlotte Pierce]

I am unlikely to participate in yet another project wide communication platform. Can't we just let things settle for a while at least until we get the handbook version 4 done?

Of course you all are welcome to conduct a discussion on any platform that you wish. I have used Discord in another project, and didn't see any wildly advantageous features. Seems to me the value of any platform like this is if there is a critical mass of people who are using it.

The group here is probably predisposed to trying new or different things. I can just about guarantee that the hairdressers and rowing club consortiums and watershed associations out there in the big wide world will not be adopting it very soon.

Maybe there should be a special Peeragogy task force for investigating new collaborative platforms?

But then I'm tired and cranky, so.

[skreutzer]

the hairdressers and rowing club consortiums and watershed associations

Heh, are these actual target groups of/for peer learning?

Maybe there should be a special Peeragogy task force for investigating new collaborative platforms?

In general, it's a good idea to research tools, review them (ideally together), catalog/list them, and not in another secret silo/pile that's legally not usable or ignores establishing peerness in licensing. But then again, most of these services are all the same to me, just some other colors/packaging, owned/operated by someone else, to be found at another location, that's mostly about it. Relatively boring, so for (my personal) practical concerns, these could become interesting if they would be open/interoperable (at the very least exports for migrating), so eventually everybody could use different customizations with the same interoperable system/infrastructure beneath it, but none of that is yet available, so for every benefit these tools/services may provide, there's also a cost/loss/limitations/dependencies attached to them. The actual work (for example on the version 4 of the handbook) is far more important, and coordinating/organizing the work around it using throw-away messaging in primitive, inconvenient communication channels can only improve if the work extends to building better communication channels, so as long as the latter isn't in scope and it's only about passively using this or that product/service, let's not bother too much about which one(s) of the myriad of similar, lacking offers could be used.

Maybe the hope is that everybody eventually joins one "platform", that's a little bit unrealistic if you have no control/influence of whom such a site/service will include and exclude, enable and prevent, while the data department + dashboard can only aggregate/federate from and signal into these incompatible sources/destinations if they technically, legally, socially/organizationally cooperate, which is not the case, and intentionally, deliberately so.

Like, the question is, does anybody want to learn about Discord (and if so, why, for what purpose/goal?), or is it about us ourselves practically using it (and if so, why, how, what's the want/need/purpose/goal behind it?)?

Just want to add that Discord, if used in certain ways, can be an excellent learning environment, because one can be part in many communities (ideally organized around a topic or something), join more specific channels in there, and benefit from direct access to people via real-time messaging (+ voice!) or asynchronous communication. With some profiles to learn/search/discover who knows/offers what and a chance to post requests/questions, one can get hands-on help quickly from whomever happens to be online/around, or a little later via reply messages. It's basically a more direct StackOverflow together with a voice channel. I think Discord is perceived more social in that sense because some people might have also joined other servers where their friends etc. are online, so it gets very easy to hop into these different communities and make connections, accumulate friends for direct communication, and so on. Like, the Slacks and Mattermosts might do or try the same, but if one is on Discord anyway as the channel for voice conferencing used while gaming, great, use the same front-end interface for work or learning just as well, despite it's all the same technically and otherwise, and not federated/distributed, interoperable, compatible, open, libre-free.

[Joe Corneli]

Hi Charlotte and Stephan,

Thank you both for sharing comments. It sounds like it's a "not right now" for making a trial of Discord, and that's totally fine with me -- maybe we would want to try it it sometime after the current session of work has ended. I appreciate Stephan's explanation of how Discord can be used as a learning environment!  This resonates with Roland's earlier description of a large scale "Distributed, Decentralized MOOC" made up of lots of different small learning communities that don't have a lot to do with each other directly.  Our reflection was that maybe the peeragogy project can contribute by weaving between them, finding patterns across them, and so on.  Stephan's analogy between Discord and Stack Exchange also works for me. But happy to save these things for later.

I was intrigued by the "Controversial content" part of the Wikipedia page about Discord.  For this part, it's not so much that we need to pile in to use these systems for practical purposes (though we may want to at some point).  For this part, I think we want to have our "theory" hats on, and think about how tools like Discord are used by Atomwaffen Division, or how WhatsApp helped get Bolsonaro elected, and so on.  I would assume that we condemn their politics and activities; however, the folks involved *nevertheless* seem to be doing peer learning of some kind.  Maybe we will eventually create a 'deprogramming' branch of the peeragogy project, though this is part of a long term orientation, rather than immediate work on v4.  Discord is pretty incidental to the story, since there are many other relevant places where learning of all kinds takes place.

My thought about "hairdressers and rowing club consortiums and watershed associations" is that these people are already doing peer learning, so it's not that we need to push tools or methods on them. What can we learn from or with them that will improve the book -- and the project's other offerings?  For example, it would be awesome to build towards a configurable software platform that's actually widely comprehensible and usable, and that can help people improve upon their lot in life.  A surprisingly relevant action item towards building this might be to chat with the person who cuts your hair...

With the tag "cool tools", I was kind of thinking of the Whole Earth Catalog.  We don't all have to live in dome homes, but we can read about them and think about related ideas.

Joe

[skreutzer]

Just to add a more clear, more useful description: I've joined a "learning support" Discord community some time ago, and they have channels for different programming channels, so members would enter the channels representing the topics they can help out with or want/need to ask questions about, and with enough people being online all the time or the chance to answer a little bit later, especially many short (StackOverflowy) questions can be resolved rather quickly, and if it's about bigger problems or larger projects, one can "escalate" to direct messaging or voice channels, or take it to other tools entirely (screenshare, GitHub, whatever). They also have an offer/request channel for (small) job offers/search project presentations, and a bunch of other things as well, so that's indeed a somewhat thriving thing. It's not open, but that's partially an "advantage" in the sense that it reduces noise and encourages directed, very quick communication/resolution, also because it's "cheap" to consume, catch up, contribute, by the use of tools like "tagging" (channels), little bit of inherent "curation"/"federation" right there already.

For the "controversial content", I doubt that this is an issue for you or us, it's more a "problem"/question for the Discord operators. In our server instance, I think you could set policy yourself and say that alt-right discussions are not allowed here (which doesn't prevent people to have such conversation on other, their own server instances). It's a little bit like Cory Doctorow's explaination of general purpose tools (another "inventor's dilemma"), for example: if you invent a hammer, which is general purpose, on the one hand it's an amazing tool to construct many useful things, but on the other hand, you have no control over the use of the instances of the hammer to prevent their use to smack a head, have you? No way to observe/monitor each use of them and intervene if a hammer is mis-used (because the instances are distributed, and moreover, private property of their owners, so they can do or not do what they want with it), nor a really effective way to influence the design to make it less fit for use cases you're not in favor of. A law making the possession and use of hammers illegal wouldn't only fix the head smacking issue, but also prevent all the good use cases, so the loss of the latter renders it to be not an option. Now, design can encourage certain uses and discourage others. There's the example illustrating this for energy: by design, it's rather unlikely that one would strap a nuclear reactor on the roof of his/her house to produce energy, or that one would drop solar panels from a plane to bomb an enemy, so it's not that the tool is necessarily always neutral, as per its design. Or Mikhail Kalashnikov, developing an assault rifle probably to defend his countrymen and fight a potential fascist invasion, to find later that the state would sell it as product and license to absolutely everybody, or just to some who would then re-sell it to highly questionable customers. And how to prevent copying? The printing press helped the reformation as well as the enlightenment. Alfred Nobel, Hitler and the radio, and so on.

With digital media and the Internet, alt-right finds itself excluded via algorithms and policies in many places, then subsequently moves to other places, into the underground, maybe to tools of their own (nothing prevents or can prevent them from building such). They feel censored (despite it's not real censorship, but their access to audiences, for which no right exists, is indeed limited) by the Silicon Valley leftists assuming their conspiration to overtake world domination. Is such "de-platforming" the solution (keep in mind, they learn to use these techniques as well)? But there can be cases where discussion doesn't help either, does it? What about addressing the deeper issues? It's already so much beyond repair down the naive routes that have been taken, with the media illiteracy contributing a great deal to it, with strong forces that play into it for financial or political gain. The question for the peer learning designers and inventors is if they're of the belief that humans are more good than bad, that the good will always somehow automatically win, or if the alternative is to not invent. But other parties may invent their stuff, and who says that your opinion of "good" is actually decent, and for whom? All the parties one deeply disagrees with, in their own mind they're the good ones, just as you're convinced about yourself. Today, all of these share the same global space, but separating again on some levels might not be a solution either.

Whole Earth Catalog about tools, materials, projects, whatnot, would be great, why not add such to our own Peeragogy library, but new works please not under CC0.

[Charlie]

On Thursday, February 20, 2020 at 3:25:53 AM UTC-6, Joe Corneli wrote:

Hi Charlotte and Stephan,

Thank you both for sharing comments. It sounds like it's a "not right now" for making a trial of Discord, and that's totally fine with me -- maybe we would want to try it it sometime after the current session of work has ended. I appreciate Stephan's explanation of how Discord can be used as a learning environment!  This resonates with Roland's earlier description of a large scale "Distributed, Decentralized MOOC" made up of lots of different small learning communities that don't have a lot to do with each other directly.  Our reflection was that maybe the peeragogy project can contribute by weaving between them, finding patterns across them, and so on.  Stephan's analogy between Discord and Stack Exchange also works for me. But happy to save these things for later.

 

Perhaps timing would work to try out discord once the pilot course concludes?

Also, perhaps in the new edition of the Handbook we can publish our reviews of $0 (e.g., free version of hangouts), paid (e.g., Zoom) and open source (keybase, jitsi, discord) communication tools?

[Charlotte Pierce]

Both great ideas - I feel queasy about my initial reaction - if Discord proves to be concord, I'm all for it, but yes - perhaps after the pilot course and/or my v4 duties are in hand. Can't be too scary, can it? :-)

Charlotte R. Pierce Publisher, Sculler, Podcaster 781-258-9608 | cpi...@post.harvard.edu piercepress.com PO Box 206, Arlington MA 02476

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[Howard Rheingold]

I’m interested in exploring Discord and Slack for peer learning


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[Paola Ricaurte Quijano]

I'm in for Discord, but not for Slack. It has serious security issues. =S

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[Charlotte Pierce]

I'vev used Slack for several years, no problem with it.

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[skreutzer]

OK, peer learning of Discord and Slack, do we have a process, some methodology, for such an activity? Also sounds like the timing should be along the lines of not before the pilot course is completed, and/or not before handbook v4 has been completed. Would still want to put Discord and Slack peer learning into some task tracking list (GitHub issue/project), so we don't forget about it. Other practical downsides are that both Slack and Discord are proprietary software/services, plus the learning might require fresh accounts to not leak message confidentiality in case of using already existing accounts.

[Lorenz Sell]

I'm wondering if I might ask some questions here... I'm not sure how to engage in this inquiry without coming across in the wrong way, but please know that I'm just curious about the underlying experience and thinking here.   And really, I'm just trying to understand how people interpret Sutra and my communication around it.

Originally, after I presented Sutra, I just assumed that because your (the Peeragogy group) communication flow was already established in Keybase and Google groups, that it was unlikely you would want to consider using or testing (as a group) another system like Sutra.  To be honest, I had hopes that there might be more interest in using Sutra for this group's work.  But then, I was intrigued to see this thread about looking at testing Discord and Slack to test it as a learning platform and run groups communications.  

I wanted to just take a chance on "putting myself out there" a little and engage in this inquiry.  I get the sense that Peeragogy is looking for alternative platforms to engage in communication, collaboration, and learning - ideally where feature requests might be seriously considered and where the ethos of the platform aligns with the ethos and aspirations of Peeragogy.  In this sense, Sutra seems to offer all the things that Peeragogy is looking for and it is specifically designed around supporting learning and knowledge building through group process.

So I'm curious why it seems (as far as I can tell) to not have been more seriously considered?  I'm trying to understand if there is something in the way it is presented, or in the feature set, my energy or that of Sutra as a project, that is not somehow landing, or if it's something else entirely.  If you might offer your direct experience with honesty, I would be very grateful.

And, please excuse this message if it comes across in a funny way.  I'm honestly just super curious and trying to understand the underlying perception here.  Thank you for "learning" with me.

[Stephan Kreutzer]

Hi Lorenz,

just as a quick practical matter: during the demo, I think you changed the settings of the example Peeragogy circle, so at least I myself was not able to use this circle/name, would have needed to create new circles and invite others. E-mailed you about this, maybe you missed it or the circle was for one-time demo purposes only anyway. Don't want to ramble in length again about other potential considerations, but I have a Sutra account for a long time already, also have some technical opinions about it, not necessarily the typical end user you're asking here.

Stephan

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[Joe Corneli]

 I guess there are two things that are on my mind about my experience with the system and our discussion about it.  I brought up in the meeting the issue of discoverability. Keybase is useful as a back channel but for our main communications we need something public. The other issue is open source: if Sutra was open source we could jump in and fix any further issues! My feeling is that if Sutra was open source we might well make the jump over there. Since I haven’t yet tried Discord, I can’t compare it, but in general a fully open source solution would be far preferable. We seem close and Sutra could indeed be a big step forward if it goes this route. What we really need is something that can stitch together different communities and different streams of information. 

[Stephan Kreutzer]

Hmm, I don't know, there isn't really a point of "open sourcing" (read: libre-freely licensing) something for the wrong reasons or have unrealistic expectations to get them disappointed, as if the mere act alone miraceously renders everything shiny, amazing and useful automatically. One could ask, why didn't a project start out libre-freely licensed to begin with, designed in a way that avoids legal debt, dependencies and conflicts that may now surface in something that was previously proprietary? The actual process might require significant effort for a technical and legal audit, replacements, maybe the design/dependencies turn out to be too much that it would be easier/cheaper to write a new alternative from scratch or simply use one of the many already existing packages. Or, like, pseudo/semi "open sourcing" wouldn't be much helpful either. And what would "Open Source" mean for remote code that runs on a server, because of which no binary/code distribution takes place in the act of "using the software" as it's just exchanging messages and the computing takes place elsewhere (SaaS loophole, describing that the end user couldn't do his/her own computing in freedom and sovereignity, instead would be dependent on the server/service operator)? Pretty much only AGPLv3 + any later would be an option, and many resist that for obvious exploitive reasons, to no surprise. And then, architecturally, the whole Web app-model centralization enforced by browsers and natural to servers causing data lock-ins aren't that good either. However, for communication services, where a man-in-the-middle (other relaying nodes in the decentralized Internet network infrastructure) is unavoidable, it's fine to use external remote services operated by third parties, as long as it's using open protocols (for which libre-freely licensed implementations exist too, ideally a recognized open standard as well). Usually such network services are simple, small, and offered/provided by many vendors/operators, can be set up and run by anybody, independently. There's nothing wrong with using or renting services if one has the option to export/migrate everything and set it up himself/herself (or find somebody else or another offer which does the same), or have a trusted friend of choice or an institution run such a service, or individuals/companies competing on quality of service, low prices, reputation, support/service, better solutions/functionality.

Discord and Slack are completely proprietary (the latter even applying questionable business practices), and yet that certanily didn't lead to disinterest in regard of potentially peer-learning about them. Other activities in the Peeragogy project context certainly too don't have a specific emphasis of digital user rights/freedom, so I'm not convinced that this is a reason why there wasn't more follow-up after the Sutra demo. I could now speculate what the various actual, real reasons might be, but won't, just want to say that it's a very, *very* common phenomenon in many communities that are like this one. That's not necessarily inherently a bad thing, fine, but as a software developer, I guess the lesson is that one can't assume/expect any media/digital literacy/interest at all, it's just way too much of a paradigmatic gap with very few attempts to educationally improve this, plus everybody is always totally busy with plenty of other, his/her own stuff.

Let's just consider for a moment the more recent talk about bridging several of such communication services: if a remote service is under the control of somebody else, what protects your work/investment/effort/solution from getting rendered void one day, if the external entity for whatever reason decides to deny you access, or change things in a non-standard, non-open way, or just change stuff constantly, or if the service with its code and data disappears entirely? Best of luck to you, whomever engages in these kinds of concepts :-) I personally find offers like these *way* to costly/expensive, even if they're gratis.

Am Do., 27. Feb. 2020 um 11:19 Uhr schrieb Joe Corneli <holtze...@gmail.com>:

 I guess there are two things that are on my mind about my experience with the system and our discussion about it.  I brought up in the meeting the issue of discoverability. Keybase is useful as a back channel but for our main communications we need something public. The other issue is open source: if Sutra was open source we could jump in and fix any further issues! My feeling is that if Sutra was open source we might well make the jump over there. Since I haven’t yet tried Discord, I can’t compare it, but in general a fully open source solution would be far preferable. We seem close and Sutra could indeed be a big step forward if it goes this route. What we really need is something that can stitch together different communities and different streams of information. 

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[Joe Corneli]

On Thu, 27 Feb 2020 at 15:44, 'Stephan Kreutzer' via Peeragogy <peer...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

Pretty much only AGPLv3 + any later would be an option

Yes, from a practical standpoint, that's what's relevant in this case.

and many resist that for obvious exploitive reasons, to no surprise.

Lorenz had said that he was (potentially) interested in "going open source" at some point, so we can provide a use case and perhaps also help think through the business model as well.

What's needed for the peeragogy project is some kind of generalized widget that takes in information streams from various places, potentially does some processing, and relays them to other places.  This is roughly what IFTTT promises, so maybe that's relevant, but I don't know (and presumably it's not AGPLv3). 'Open source' is most relevant here to the extent that we can make, share, and use  customizations.  Given that many of the services we'd want to interface with are still proprietary (Github, Discord, etc.) it's reasonable to think that we'd be working with APIs a lot of the time.

Sutra could be great as a dashboard and "hub" -- if it not only allowed programmatic extensions to access other data sources, but also allowed us to change they way they appear for general users and day-to-day interaction.

There's nothing wrong with using or renting services if one has the option to export/migrate everything and set it up himself/herself (or find somebody else or another offer which does the same), or have a trusted friend of choice or an institution run such a service, or individuals/companies competing on quality of service, low prices, reputation, support/service, better solutions/functionality.

For Linode, Digital Ocean, Amazon, Heroku, etc., the business model is centers on computation.

We could relatively easily move many of our interactions to free/open alternatives, e.g., I have a mail server so there's no real reason to continue using Gmail except out of habit and because Google is used as the SSO provider of choice for many platforms.  Making an exodus from non-free software would have to be pretty strategic.  If Sutra was "better than" Gmail and also free, it would help make the case.  We'd still have to deal with SSO, but most sites do allow people to sign up with email, so we could do something clever there.  Maybe like the Discord username+NUMBER thing to allow people to sign up to various websites without getting spammed or tracked.

Discord and Slack are completely proprietary (the latter even applying questionable business practices), and yet that certanily didn't lead to disinterest in regard of potentially peer-learning about them.

Quite.  Stack Exchange is another example: it's blended, with proprietary software, CC-By-SA content.

https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/109786/what-is-the-license-on-stack-overflow-questions-and-answers

We probably want to be able to interface with all platforms where major amounts of peer learning are happening, to learn from them, and to share whatever we come up with.

 

as a software developer, I guess the lesson is that one can't assume/expect any media/digital literacy/interest at all, it's just way too much of a paradigmatic gap with very few attempts to educationally improve this, plus everybody is always totally busy with plenty of other, his/her own stuff.

An open source Sutra would give a boost to those people (a rather small number) who are working at the intersection of peeragogy & programming.  Without it, we carry on using current tools. If we wanted to build our own open source Sutra clone we could base it on Drupal or write it from scratch in some other language/framework.  Person hours for this are a limiting factor.

If we want to grow our capacity here, we'll need something that's interesting and useful for other developers.

Let's just consider for a moment the more recent talk about bridging several of such communication services: if a remote service is under the control of somebody else, what protects your work/investment/effort/solution from getting rendered void one day, if the external entity for whatever reason decides to deny you access, or change things in a non-standard, non-open way, or just change stuff constantly, or if the service with its code and data disappears entirely? Best of luck to you, whomever engages in these kinds of concepts :-) I personally find offers like these *way* to costly/expensive, even if they're gratis.

Downstream analytics and processing on open source content stores and associated workflows (e.g. Wikipedia, Stack Exchange, Red Hat, Github) can provide us with plenty to do, and many others are engaged in such work.  If we want to dip into other pools of content that are not freely licensed that will have its own headaches for sure but may have some rewards as well.  For now I think we have our hands full providing a service (primarily) to those who are creating freely licensed stuff.  A second best source of content would be "public but not licensed" for which the difficulties and risks you mentioned apply strongly. I think dealing with these is a lower priority. 

[skreutzer]

Lorenz had said that he was (potentially) interested in "going open source" at some point, so we can provide a use case and perhaps also help think through the business model as well.

I'm not speculating about Lorenz/Sutra here, it's more a hint into the direction of WordPress for example, which is for historical reasons stuck on GPLv2 (no later version), and they can't possibly change or upgrade the license by obtaining consent from the many contributors, let alone close the SaaS loophole with an AGPL clause. Sure, in many situations a given WordPress installation in terms of Core is the unmodified stock variant, but if not, neither users nor end users can benefit from improvements and bug fixes to an instance running as an de-facto proprietary service, which defies the whole point of using the GPL to begin with. Subsequently, a lot of plugins and themes under restrictive licenses are available on a vibrant market, and that's partially seen as a benefit/advantage, in an economic/business sense anyway. From software freedom, recognizing the nature of digital, wasting human capacity for wheel-reinvention, etc. etc. it's a serious desastrous flaw conceptually, but it's easy to see why people like it and why the project/companyis particularly successful because of this specific setup. But OK, we don't yet have the full prominent counter-example of plug-and-play interoperable AGPL solutions that work on the local machine just as well as self-hosted, or as an external remote offering. On the Internet, on libre-freely licensed operating systems, that's already more or less the norm (without much funding or cost!), but on the server-/app-centric Web and proprietary operating systems, who knows how long it'll take, if ever, to advance to a more sophisticated stage, and not just a crappy fake illusion of it.

For business models, typically hosting (maintenance, support, configuration, customization), group facilitation too, or: who's the customer/user anyway and what do they want/need, is it cross-subsidization via a support contract/license/renting in exchange for access of data locked in and functionality made dependent upon that finances the costs and software development, or are there more direct other options, what about competition, like: I want to be very careful to advise somebody to trade away his/her income, which is why I think it very much depends on the end goal. It's always easier to exploit money from people by various questionable means, and it's something different to create a decent digital future for ourselves and society. Ideally income and ethics aren't mutually exclusive, but it's easy to see how much learning/education, change, effort and so on might be necessary to improve on that front even a tiny little bit, also given that powerful entities are fighting hard all the time to prevent what would be at the expense of their personal benefit/leverage.

What's needed for the peeragogy project is some kind of generalized widget that takes in information streams from various places, potentially does some processing, and relays them to other places.  This is roughly what IFTTT promises, so maybe that's relevant, but I don't know (and presumably it's not AGPLv3). 'Open source' is most relevant here to the extent that we can make, share, and use  customizations.  Given that many of the services we'd want to interface with are still proprietary (Github, Discord, etc.) it's reasonable to think that we'd be working with APIs a lot of the time.

The Peeragogy Dashboard comes to mind, yes. Don't know much about IFTTT, but shouldn't be too difficult to build a little thing like it, right? Or it would depend on what data/format/source needs we concretely have, to see how to best deal with them in terms of implementation effort, ease of use (configurability for regular users), quality of results. For me personally, GitHub is entirely written off despite it only slowly gets worse, but because it's part of Microsoft's smart plan to regain their previous control over all computing, and it seems like none of the "Open Source" guys realize any of it, moreover quite ironic that it's hosting for git (all just for fun, I assume). But why care, it's still gratis hosting for public "open-source"-licensed projects, and as one can make backups and share them independently and always upload them elsewhere (exports, migration to other providers enabled via the open protocol), all that's potentially lost is the account and it's accumulated history and social connections, and where the domain/identity is used, authority potentially if no other place is established. With the peeragogy.org domain/website, sure, would just be redirected to another place. Discord, I personally consider material there as throw-away communication, where it's more important to coordinate with people to make progress until a service like it is replaced/not needed any more. APIs can be a source of data for extraction and sometimes with an adapter allow interfacing with a service, but if remote, one is potentially meshing client code together with the custom programming/code/interface of the remote entity, and that can easily break (depending on circumstances, I mean, there's also XML-RPC and SOAP and what not). I guess Bret Victor in "The Future of Programming" isn't much in favor of APIs for that reason, I too grew a little bit reluctant after getting screwed by them. There's more talks/thinking about this, not really the one silver bullet solution around yet as it seems, but yeah, may arrive one day, or at least why not be mindful before joining the API conspirators/cult? :-)

For Linode, Digital Ocean, Amazon, Heroku, etc., the business model is centers on computation.

I think such cloud computing providers (which play into the SaaSS, Software-as-a-Service-Substitute problem for computing that could/should be local, an FSF slogan is "there's no cloud, just other people's computers", see Adobe vs. Venezuela) can't hope to do the data/functionality lock-in because they don't have an operating system, don't have a search engine, don't have an app store etc. to exploit vertical integration, and while they gained/grew a lot with the online/cloud expansion, my impression is that they're in a serious battle going forward who, if any, will survive, just as for compliance, security, scaling reasons (consider enterprise! not the general population) maybe only Azure, Google, Amazon (or basically the biggest ones) may remain, or what about DropBox? Even Microsoft almost ended up on the loosing side, being late with the Web/servers, mobile, cloud/SaaS. But OK, these are some speculations about the software/computing/networks industry, a few potential trends here and there, wondering how other people (here, peer learners) see this.

 

I have a mail server so there's no real reason to continue using Gmail except out of habit and because Google is used as the SSO provider of choice for many platforms.

But nobody really needs to use the Google SSO/account for using the mailing list, right (nor no)? It's also an open Internet protocol, and everybody gets a copy into the inbox. There are definitively more evil/harmful setups I guess :-)

Making an exodus from non-free software would have to be pretty strategic.

If the main purpose/activity for now is to curate/steward the handbook, I don't think it's a totally terrible situation regarding our tools and communication channels, despite being primitive. If there are courses one day and collaborative project work and what not, I imagine that it could really bite into realizing some potential, resilience and stuff to not have more control over the infrastructure/service/tools that are used (long-term). Unfortunately, one can't A/B test and there's also the risk screwing things up doing things independently, so one can never see what the alternative would have been. In my mind, these are just two separate worlds that exist in parallel, as different islands to join or leave (not considering the up-hill battle against the massive leverage centralization/dependencies/lock-in exploitation provides).

If we wanted to build our own open source Sutra clone we could base it on Drupal or write it from scratch in some other language/framework.  Person hours for this are a limiting factor.

Only to find out that we ourselves wouldn't potentially use it much, for the other additional reasons Lorenz sometimes encounters too :-) At least for the data department, there's always the chance if somebody comes along and claims to have a want/need, to look into how two things may interoperate, ideally avoiding integration in the sense that the parts become reliant on each other, assimilated in a sense (the latter offers some benefits too, but at a price, and maybe we can get away cheaper/better using a little bit of system architecture).

 

Downstream analytics and processing on open source content stores and associated workflows (e.g. Wikipedia, Stack Exchange, Red Hat, Github) can provide us with plenty to do, and many others are engaged in such work.

One branch of Peeragogy could be about swarming other open projects and doing curation/sprints there, for learning/contributional purposes. Just saying... Even discovering, "mapping" (listing), investigating, reviewing, promoting/presenting, integrating them would indeed be plenty to do, and also hopefully of great benefit for everybody involved + beyond.