3 ms·

Can someone here clue me in about why mailing lists still appear to be the de-facto platform for communication for a lot of open source projects - particularly

• kstrauser 12y ago
  Because the alternative is web forum software, none of which is as good at thread management ("alert me to replies to this thread", "hide this thread", "beep when Jane Smith posts") as a good email client. Also, email is ubiquitous: you can follow and participate in conversations from a phone as easily as a desktop. Finally, you only have to learn one email client, and can then use those skills on every mailing list you join. That's in contrast with "project Foo uses SomeBoard v1.3 and has this new feature, but project Bar uses SomeBoard v1.1 and doesn't have it yet. Project Baz uses OtherBoard 0.6 which has this one cool thing but lacks have the features of SomeBoard." Remember, this is the same group of people that gets passionately whipped up about text editors. Can you imagine them not having strong opinions about forum interfaces? Defaulting to good old email and letting everyone use their interface of choice is probably the only practical way to get everyone to participate.