On 2020-06-10 08:24:24 -0700 (-0700), Saul Wold wrote: [...]
Your welcome to participate in those forums and report back if there are issues, but I don't think we want to maintain 2 communication channels, as I believe Discourse is both a forum and mailing list combined. [...]
Having struggled repeatedly to interact with Discourse via E-mail, I can say that it's not really a mailing list. It has some features to feed you posts via E-mail and accept replies, but that is where the similarity to a traditional listserv ends. I've been exploring upgrading our Mailman servers the newer 3.x series which enables a lot of Web forum like workflows (via Hyperkitty), but can also say that it turns mailing lists into Web forums about as well as Discourse turns Web forums into mailing lists (that is to say, probably not sufficiently for folks who are seeking a real "Web forum experience"). Personally, I miss Usenet, and wish I had sufficient time to work on adding an NNTP connector for our lists. But the long as short of it is that communities use different tools to communicate, and as someone who participates in lots of diverse communities I've had to learn to do so with a wide variety of tools. Choice of communication tooling is not what makes or breaks a community, and spending too much time jumping back and forth between popular communication platforms of the day serves mostly to eat effort which could otherwise be spent improving software the community is there to produce and maintain. That the Linux kernel developers continue to use mailing lists for discussion, and even for sharing and reviewing Git commits, has not resulted in the death of their community (quite the contrary). -- Jeremy Stanley