On Thu, Apr 20, 2023 at 11:21 PM Matthew Miller <mat...@fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> I propose that we transition devel list, and eventually most of our > mailing lists, to Fedora Discussion (our Discourse-powered forum). > I've spent more than a decade perfecting my email filters and I have a setup that works for me very well. I dislike certain aspects of mailing lists (cross-posting, top-posting, reply-to, etc, which just can't work well when everyone has to be vigilant all the time to do things right), but I *like* my existing setup and processes. But that's me, us, the old timers. Having said that, my impression is that mailing lists are an already lost battle. If you don't have an influx of new contributors, your project is going to die eventually. Mailing lists are a big hurdle for newcomers. Young people are not used to it (who still uses mailing lists, in read-write mode, except for OSS communities?), the lists are difficult to set up, the user interfaces are bad, there are many peculiarities to be aware of (top-posting, etc). I don't know if moving away from mailing lists will make our contributor base grow, but I'm quite certain that staying with mailing lists will make our contributor base **not** grow. And our project will slowly decline over time. Imagine that you want to contribute to a project and you discover they're still using svn, or cvs. There are still some. I personally wouldn't be bothered, I'd just invest time elsewhere. I value my time. I imagine this feeling might be similar to what younger people feel when they're asked to use a mailing list. It would require too much investment from them, and so they'll go somewhere else with a more comfortable barrier to entry. With some things, there's a simple transition path, because new things are both technically superior and more comfortable at the same time, and still extremely similar. Svn -> git. Plain git -> git with pull requests. Irc -> Matrix. But we don't really have the same equivalent with mailing lists. I guess mailman3+hyperkitty was supposed to be that replacement, but as we can see, it didn't work out. A discussion forum is very different, but it's a workflow that people are familiar with and has much easier onboarding. Mailing lists are a lost cause. They are being abandoned, nobody migrates *to* mailing lists. If we want to keep new blood flowing in, we can't be afraid to change stuff. We have to adapt, instead of requiring everyone else to adapt to us. I already have some experience with Discourse and so far it seemed OK to me. But I haven't used it as frequently and in such a volume as mailing lists. I also still haven't built my workflow alternative to my email workflow in there. But I'd be happy to experiment with it. But in order to get real-world experience, it would be great if this was a shared experience, where a mass of users really moves and starts using it as a primary discussion platform. Then we can collectively figure out the benefits and drawbacks and any workarounds for those drawbacks. Cheers, Kamil
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