Seemed that the site went down for a few days there... Are we back now?
That brief scare made me wonder: what's in store for CAPTalk's future?
Many folks obviously seem fine with Reddit as an alternative, but I'm personally feeling pretty done with that platform. I follow r/civilairpatrol via RSS now and only log in if there's something specific I want to share or comment on. Too many ads and garbage for casual browsing. Same goes for Facebook; I log in once a year just to see if it's as bad as I remember (spoiler, it is).
Outside of the CAP space, though, I've actually noticed that some online forums seem to be gaining new users and becoming more active recently, so I don't think I'm alone in looking to create some distance between myself and mainstream social media. I could see the potential for a CAPTalk revival in the next couple of years.
That said, to those in the know, what does the official future of Captalk.net look like?
In addition to the recent outage, the site's SSL cert is missing or invalid (or just never existed), and the e-mail service seems broken, too (possibly due to missing dmarc records?).
Are there plans to fix things and keep them going, or should we be looking for alternative ways forward?
Thanks for all the years, so far.
Social media is so widespread today with multiple niche groups and fan pages alike. There's so much connectivity at everyone's fingertips, and I imagine that there are more people chatting in various Facebook groups, Discord channels, and other easy access apps than on their PC/web browser.
As someone with 2,500 posts/comments on CAP Talk over the years, I don't see it being a viable or even credible source of information.
Let's be honest...most of us check in for scuttlebutt and entertainment, not for deep knowledge or learning opportunities.
If CAP Talk went away tomorrow, very few people are affected. That said, I'll continue to check in and read. But I'm looking for a little more engagement than what's on here lately; and there are more obituaries being posted than there are new topics; and I'm not really interested in reading death notices as my source of CAP intel.