[znpy]

mailing lists are actually great for keeping track of threads and topics.

and are pretty much the only open technology that is sufficiently technology-agnostic and interoperable.

what should be the alternative, facebook comment threads?

[tzs]

The alternative is newsgroups and NNTP.

They are open, technology agnostic, interoperable, and most news readers are way better at threaded discussions involving more than two people than almost every email client.

[dt3ft]

You sound like someone who never used GitHub/GitLab/Jira/Any forum which offers categories/topics/threads and their respective issue tracking/organizing features.

[pas]

GitLab issues?

[gray_-_wolf]

You can easily branch mailing thread into multiple separate ones (happens regularly on gnu mailing lists for example). Compared to that, threading in all of the git forges sucks hard.

[pas]

You can easily search for open issues, tag/label them, mange milestones, you know, project stuff. Plus you get a web interface that's a bit more user friendly than mailman's. You can see what's going on, how much open issues there are.

How hard it is to open N separate issues and link them to the original one? It's exactly as much effort as sending new emails.

TC39 uses GitHub: https://github.com/tc39/

There's also the IETF datatracker, and various sites cobbled together to show the mail threads (eg. https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/browse/acme/ ) and states of various RFCs. And basically to manage work.

Email is great, and it's enough for IETF workgroups, but it's just a communication channel, it's far from an efficient tool to organize (track, show, share, plan) work.

[Avamander]

They are not.

Gitea, GitLab, GitHub, Bitbucket, Discourse literally everything else similar to those is more usable than the pieces of turd that mailing lists are. I instantly assign a negative score in my mind to all projects that still find them in any way usable.

[calcifer]

> I instantly assign a negative score in my mind to all projects that still find them in any way usable.

Sounds like the filtering works!

[Avamander]

Yeah, I can be grateful, it's like a big red warning color that the project members are gatekeepy and don't wish to keep up with the times.

Don't come crying when you can't find any contributors, it's your own undoing.

[calcifer]

I don't think it's gatekeepy to say that not everything has to be attractive to literally everyone. We are not robots, we are individuals with personal preferences and comforts. Those that grew up with mailing lists naturally find it more comfortable for them. I'm sure those who grew up with e.g Github feel the same way about that.

[Avamander]

> I don't think it's gatekeepy to say that not everything has to be attractive to literally everyone.

It really is gatekeepy to keep something that is only attractive to a very select group of people.

> Those that grew up with mailing lists naturally find it more comfortable for them.

Yeah, which is exactly why I called it a massive red flag. It's the unwillingness to suffer short-term discomfort over long-term benefit of new contributors and overall better user experience and accessibility.