[tempest_]

That feels like a totally fair assessment.

I guess I would say that mailing lists favor producers over consumers.

Often when I am looking at a mailing list it is for the same reason I am poking through a GitHub issue. I am looking for someone who had a similar problem and maybe someone else had a solution.

Thus I think I am largely a consumer.

As a consumer I dont often think, let me go to my email client. My email client is where I get bills and notifications and some personal correspondence. It is definitely not where I go when I am looking to consume.

I would disagree that it is as easy as just signing up with an email. I have to set up filters etc and shift to an entirely different client after I sign up the entering an email address is just the first step.

I feel that for people who are core developers email lists are probably great. They are essentially looking to communicate with only a few people and the topics are quite specific. Where they fail me is they make it harder to convert a consumer to a producer. For all the problems I have with OSS's seemingly centralization on Github I am far more likely to drop into some random Github issue than I am to join a mailing list.

[dr_zoidberg]

How about an interface like GitHub issues? Do you feel that strikes a balance between consumers/producers for this kind of discussions?

Edit: I think you updated your comment while I replied (or maybe I just hit reply without seing the last part of your comment). I see now that you've mentioned GitHub issues, which is a kind of interface that I've seen get a better balance, but I'm not sure how it stands from a producor pov against a mailing list (decentralization is obviously lacking on them).

[yxhuvud]

GH issues does not fan out into contextual threads. That makes it a nonstarter.

[arp242]

They have "Discussions" now which includes threads and such, but I haven't really used it much other than leaving a comment just yesterday, so I don't really know how good or bad it is.

[marcosdumay]

> I guess I would say that mailing lists favor producers over consumers.

It favors insiders and temporal information, but there's no bias on the producers vs. consumers dimension. Unfortunately, you are an outsider trying to access old information, so you are severely disfavored here. A subredit is slightly less biased against outsiders but is much more heavily biased against old information.

If you can structure your information it is almost always better in another format, but there is always something that can't.