5 ms·

This is great for small one-off projects, but I don't know why anyone would want to promote the usage of mailing lists in general. The industry moved on to more

by chmln 8y ago

This is great for small one-off projects, but I don't know why anyone would want to promote the usage of mailing lists in general. The industry moved on to more centralized solutions like github for a reason - mailing lists are clunky, intuitive, and simply horrible for large discussions. Because old and large projects are using them doesn't mean it's a good reason for new projects to use them today. If anyone has problems with using closed-source platforms like github, there are open-source alternatives like gogs/gitea so you're fully in charge. Abandoning the openness of such platforms in favor of mailing lists would be a big step backwards.

saagarjha 8y ago
> mailing lists are clunky, intuitive, and simply horrible for large discussions On the contrary, I largely prefer mailing lists for non-code discussions (i.e. things that are not code review or filing bugs). When Swift's mailing lists moved to Discourse I realized that I stopped interacting with it as much because it was more inconvenient to work with (especially on mobile).
- chmln 8y ago
  If you self-host your own git service, you could email everyone e.g. in a specific organization very easily. On something like GitHub it's nearly impossible, but when you own your data its just a database query + email away.
  - Boulth 8y ago
    You can write a web hook that'll be called by Github (authenticated with a shared secret) to do that job. Unless I don't understand the use case.
black-tea 8y ago
Small, one-off projects like Linux, postgres, git? What makes mailing lists worse for large discussions? Decent mail readers support threaded conversations and decent mailing list participants know how to quote properly. This has been around for decades and I don't think github discussions add anything except more noise maybe.
- Yaggo 8y ago
  Yeah, I think it's more a cultural problem than technical limitation of email system. Even many technical users nowadays lack email skills.
- kkarakk 8y ago
  >Decent mail readers and decent mailing list participants the first is rare(in that no one bothers using mail readers) and the latter is non existent in the current generation - which you do have to interact with.
u801e 8y ago
One thing that mailing lists (and newsgroups) have over platforms like Github is threaded discussions. It's similar to comparing reddit and HN to facebook and github. But email lists (and newsgroups) have one thing that even HN and reddit do not. That is, the ability to quickly see new posts. In HN, I have to search through the entire thread to find new posts when I refresh the page. It's the same issue with reddit unless you're a subreddit moderator or have a reddit gold subscription.

by chmln 8y ago

saagarjha 8y ago

> mailing lists are clunky, intuitive, and simply horrible for large discussions On the contrary, I largely prefer mailing lists for non-code discussions (i.e. things that are not code review or filing bugs). When Swift's mailing lists moved to Discourse I realized that I stopped interacting with it as much because it was more inconvenient to work with (especially on mobile).

chmln 8y ago
If you self-host your own git service, you could email everyone e.g. in a specific organization very easily. On something like GitHub it's nearly impossible, but when you own your data its just a database query + email away.
- Boulth 8y ago
  You can write a web hook that'll be called by Github (authenticated with a shared secret) to do that job. Unless I don't understand the use case.

black-tea 8y ago

Small, one-off projects like Linux, postgres, git? What makes mailing lists worse for large discussions? Decent mail readers support threaded conversations and decent mailing list participants know how to quote properly. This has been around for decades and I don't think github discussions add anything except more noise maybe.

Yaggo 8y ago
Yeah, I think it's more a cultural problem than technical limitation of email system. Even many technical users nowadays lack email skills.
kkarakk 8y ago
>Decent mail readers and decent mailing list participants the first is rare(in that no one bothers using mail readers) and the latter is non existent in the current generation - which you do have to interact with.

u801e 8y ago

One thing that mailing lists (and newsgroups) have over platforms like Github is threaded discussions. It's similar to comparing reddit and HN to facebook and github. But email lists (and newsgroups) have one thing that even HN and reddit do not. That is, the ability to quickly see new posts. In HN, I have to search through the entire thread to find new posts when I refresh the page. It's the same issue with reddit unless you're a subreddit moderator or have a reddit gold subscription.