HACKER Q&A
📣 sodality2

How would you keep in touch with a group of people for 10 years?


I graduate high school this year, and I'd like to keep in touch with my classmates. Since just 15 of us spent almost every class together because of the program we took, we're very tight-knit and I'd like to think we want to keep in touch with each other in the next few years, even if we don't communicate regularly.

There is a convenient 5-letter .com domain that aptly describes the program at our school specifically, so it would cost maybe $100 to register it for the next 10 years and toss a comment section and photo album onto it. I don't want to have to teach everyone how to make an account, etc on another service (plus I can't guarantee everyone will remember their password, or that it will still be running) so a comment section might be ideal.

If I don't act quickly, someone's gonna make a Facebook group..

Can you think of a better way to allow a group of people to stay in contact with each other, planning for the long-term future?

Other things I've considered: Social media group (not long term), email thread (push notification style might stop people from updating it), group chat (ditto).

  👤 jleyank Accepted Answer ✓
Fwiw, I used a fantasy sports league to keep in touch with my college buddies and its worked for decades. By having an organized activity that occurs yearly, we have an excuse to communicate. Anything to reinforce the desire to stay in touch is a win.

And as people will change over time, having something that isn’t a huge time sink or controversial is good.

👤 raphar
We have succeded at that for 25 years with my group of college mates. Your description of your group fits perfectly to ours except that our group was from an IT college and that helps with technology.

We started with emails, and some years ago we changed for a WhatsApp group.

During these years we shared and still share, daily news about technology, family, jobs, politics, whatever.

We lost some members for different reasons but the remaining 15, love the place. We are all around the globe now, but this chat make us feel extremely near to each other.

👤 leros
Whatever you end up doing, just recognize that it takes legitimate effort to stay in touch with people. It gets harder as people get older, get married, have kids, etc.
👤 vimy
My friends and I started an irc channel in high school in 2005. We switched to slack a couple years ago. Chat volume has died down a lot since most have babies now but we’re still in touch.

So I would say a slack / discord group is the best way.

👤 ss108
I think Facebook is a good tool for this, but you guys are in a generation that doesn't use it anyways, so it may not be effective.

Maybe a Discord server? During Covid, one of my friends made a Discord server for their high school group, people used it.

👤 brudgers
Facebook.

That's a problem it solved.

Or group chat, that's how my kid stays connected with the people from high school years...

...I should say group chats. There are several, I believe.