The primary reason I got my license wasn't to talk--something I do very infrequently--but rather I was interested in the technlogy behind shared locations track

The primary reason I got my license wasn't to talk--something I do very infrequently--but rather I was interested in the technlogy behind shared locations tracking, but without infrastructure requirements. (think all the phone apps that show the location of your friends or family, but without needing a cell provider or cloud server.) The tech is called APRS and usually works at 1200 baud on 2 meter radio, and runs on top of AX.25 packet radio. It grew up more or less at the same time as consumer GPS in the late 90's (though I think it was first specified in the late 80s. The article delicately hits on one of the biggest things potentially holding amateur radio back in the US (can't speak to other locations)--specifically that there is a strong and vocal contingent in the AR community that is negative, dismissive, and sometimes downright rude to newcomers. My age is somewhere in the middle--younger than most hams I've met, and probably older tham most people here. Fortunately, locally, most of the hams I've met have been very friendly and helpful, but online there is a lot of venom. Part of it is political--people frequently conflate two interests, say AR and politics, and assume everyone else has the same two conflated interested. While I don't like to discuss politics with people, I'm not interestedin going to a AR meeting or event, and having to spent the whole time hearing people discuss politics. Part is cultural--AR is like a clique where a lot of people who've been in it for 50 years are resistant to people with different uses joining. It was a very long time before people stopped looking down on "no-code" hams--i.e. people who took their licensing exam after the FCC removed the morse code test. I also remember reding an official article on one of the most popular ham forums (not a trash post, but a published article) trashing "maker fairs" because it made him think of "homemaker", and that demeaned what he did. Again, locally, I've never encountered this kind of attitude, but it is common enough online that I simply don't interact with other hams online. Its not whats interesting to me anyway--I got into it to get offline (I travel in places in my state that are over 100 miles from a cell signal, so infrastructure-free location tracking is great.) But I can see those attitudes poisoning interest from people younger tham me who socialize online and will think that this is the hobby, and walk away because they don't want to be a part of it. I hope I'm wrong, and I hope there are better resources online than what I saw a few years ago when I looked.