Off topic, but I notice FreeDOS still uses email mailing lists. What email mailing list software / platforms are people using these days? Can you get mail delivered if you install an OSS mailing list and stand up your own server (vps or whatever)?
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> FreeDOS still uses email mailing lists
I'm a bit surprised by this statement. Does this imply that there are now a bunch of FOSS projects that don't use mailing lists? Mailing lists are by far my preferred method of communicating with projects. Please don't tell me people are moving to github issues or some such?
One prominent example, Rust started off with mailing lists but shut them off a decade ago or so. Many other projects I participate in or follow have moved their communication to other means, Discord and Discourse are popular, sometimes the mailing lists remain but are silent, sometimes they are removed.
Both Discourse and Discord seem entirely inappropriate for FOSS projects -- they are both proprietary walled-garden SaaS applications that aren't themselves consistent with FOSS principles, and they are both exclusively web-based with close coupling between the UI and the underlying functionality, which makes it difficult or impossible for users to access, log, and archive messages with tools most optimal for their own workflow.
FOSS projects should communicate over open protocols with a variety of interoperable implementations -- whether with tried and true tools like NNTP, mailing lists, and IRC, or more novel solutions like Matrix -- instead of allowing a proprietary third-party web application to present a one-size-fits-all interface and function as a single point of failure for project coordination.
Discord is definitely inappropriate, but Discourse is open source and has an API for anyone's custom use, including stuff like RSS feeds. I've been dealing with email since the 80's, and I'm quite familiar with the power of email clients, but for any given project I'd much rather use Discourse. While email clients have message organization down pat, the UI for content itself is retrograde, and email deliverability is a complete crapshoot and getting worse every year. On a web forum, when you see your post, you can be pretty sure everyone else will see that post too.
You can shake your fist against the tide as much as you want, but a lot of projects are populated entirely from people who grew up after the web was born, and their members see no need to keep looking back to a system designed for a world before TCP/IP itself.
You're trying to make this into an old vs. new argument, but I'm just looking at good vs. bad. Discourse being self-hostable FOSS certainly ameliorates that part of my criticism, but it still suffers from being a web-only application with close coupling between functionality and presentation, and contrary to your complaint about "retrograde" UIs, I find Discourse's interface to be quite slow and disorganized, and offers a "narrow" view of discussion, in contrast to more mature UIs' "broad" view.
"Message organization" is one of the most significant elements of this particular use case. Maintaining well-organized archives is extremely important, and it's not enough for messages merely to be searchable -- they should be easily browseable by topic and time range.
I'd say Discourse makes a different set of tradeoffs, and a large percentage of people are fine with those tradeoffs. Discourse could use some alternative clients for sure, and it'd be even better if there were a standard for such clients to coalesce around. It seems these days all the effort around standardizing such a thing is in the fediverse, which is a fine idea but ActivityPub is an over-engineered monstrosity that results in incompatible servers and clients anyway.
Does Discourse have searchable history?
Discord is out not because it's proprietary, but because it doesn't have usable history. They could be GPL and they'd still be bad.
Of course Discourse is searchable, it wouldn't be much of a discussion board if it wasn't. Many Discourse-based fora I've been on even do a live search as you type the subject of a post, something that turns out really handy for community support boards.
Discord's lack of searchability is certainly a biggie, but having all history locked away and unexportable in any way is the worst part of it.
And damn the two similar names are confusing, I find myself typing one when I meant the other...
Ah so Discourse is ... a forum software? Got it :)
Several projects I'm interested in have gone to Discourse. I don't mind the Web interface but the infantile notifications I receive and the nonsense the application sticks into a thread are annoying at best and add nothing to the usefulness of the forum. It otherwise detracts from what should be technical discussions.
Another annoyance are projects that choose to autolock threads in Discourse. On a technical forum such actions are unwarranted as there are times when an investigation can take months and remembering to add a nonsense post to keep a thread from autolocking doesn't always happen. So, a collection of disjoined threads result and even with links to the prior thread(s) the flow of investigation is greatly disrupted. SMH
I think we should establish a term for “FOSS and contributing to the project or getting support does not require using proprietary software”. Strongly FOSS?
I've contributed to two, and neither used mailing lists. One lived in discord, the other handled comms via github issues and project contributor messaging.
Unfortunately, many newer open source projects tend to prefer Discord or other closed plantforms for their primary communication channels.
Out of the top of my limited experience the only project I interacted with not on GitHub or similar is Linux.
I personally avoid using email entirely when possible. The amount of spam has made it almost totally useless to me
Yes, CPython moved to Discourse and then censored the mailing lists, which are now defunct. Discourse offers superior tracking and censoring abilities, so only those who have the right opinions and work for the right corporations can be heard.
The fact that there is little real progress can be suppressed.
I can't speak to running a mailing list but guaranteeing delivery to everyone is already a hard task with just one user. Primary difficulty will be getting an IP in a "clean" subnet - the IP that comes with a cheapo VPS will have random neighbors that you can't control and who might get the whole /24 onto blacklists again and again. If you are ok with writing off e.g. Microsoft (hosted Outlook, Hotmail, etc.) or whoever gives you trouble then that makes things easier. This is fine for personal mail depending on what your friends use but with a public service you are going to run into users with problems receiving mail from a random VPS.
The one I have seen the most is Mailman.
SourceHut has built-in support for mailing lists.