[Starlingx-discuss] StarlingX Adoption discussions in PTG

[Jeremy Stanley]

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
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