Mailing lists work exactly because of your complaint - they force you to stick around longer than you would with a webforum or IRC. If the list is good you'll s

Mailing lists work exactly because of your complaint - they force you to stick around longer than you would with a webforum or IRC. If the list is good you'll say "yeah, I want to see what else is going on with this project." If you're purely an end-user it's much more frustrating, of course. My main gripe about mailing lists is that I prefer using digest mode because it loads faster over webmail. But if I use it, it becomes non-trivial to reply to a particular discussion thread. Really, that isn't a huge gripe, in the grand scheme of things. As for "good lists" - pretty much any active project with a topic you're interested in will have some discussion.