Only tangentially related, but I'm always fascinated that mailing lists are still a thing in 2025.
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It's rhetorical of course, it's because their users are completely blind to their pitfalls after decades of use, and it seems that generation-renewal is not a priority.
Discord servers and other contemporary solutions are much worse on the long run, but it does not matter. Software is like startups, long term is not a goal when you are not sure to survive (or in that case, being used and having contributors) next week.
As far as contributing go, coding a bug fix or a new features takes way longer than figuring how sending patch over mail works (for the extreme case) and you only need to do it once.
And opensource is not a popularity contest.
And having a built-in issue tracker
1. isn't related to those properties, and
2. isn't truly within the scope of a source code version control management solution.
That's the domain of project management.
I don't think I've read anything that I disagree with so strongly in a while. "Software is like startups" is about as user and contributor-hostile a concept as they come.
The long term absolutely matters and projects choosing convenience today over long-term thinking are screwing over their future. It's damn near impossible to find information about these projects outside the proprietary silos they've dug themselves into and they will regret the choice one of these days when Discord or whatever proprietary service starts tightening the screws to make money.
I'm not sure what you find hostile about their web appearance. It's a light, clean page with text that doesn't throw tons of JS at you, pop-ups, or a cookie accept/reject/ponder bullshit dialog. It could use a bit of a copy edit / redo and a screenshot (I always complain when a project doesn't have screenshots...), but I don't find it hostile in the least.
I would be happy to engage on that thought, but here on this thread there is a lynchmob gathering to declare an emergency to remove all GPL-connected code everywhere, again.. because `screen`
Like any implementation, it comes with certain affordances which differ from other implementations.
Messages feel "heavy" for several reasons: sending one involves a lot of clicks (or keypresses); if you send a very high number you may be banned from your email provider, and unable to communicate with anyone.
Messages often arrive instantly, but can be delayed up to hours or days, so conversation round-trips are kept to a minimum.
Messages are all the same - there are no "lite messages" such as emoji reactions - so any message must contain enough content to justify being a full-fledged message, or it won't be sent at all. (Sometimes an "emoji reaction" is felt to be enough content to justify a full-fledged message, which is sent.)
Being off the web increases the barrier to entry, reducing the eternal september effect (ironically, Usenet is one of the least eternal-september-ish of the public discussion boards currently in existence).
Overall, the feel of the system tends to somewhat discourage quantity and encourage per-message quality.
Haven't you heard about the abomination which is Office365? They recently bolted emoji reactions onto email!
- can only participate in conversations via e-mails
- unclear how to participate in / reply to an older thread that wasn't delivered to your mailbox
- NOT accessible, especially in the disabilities sense
- doesn't have a search feature; depends on external search engines to crawl the mailing list for discoverability
- no responsive design, tiny text and horizontal scrolling on mobile phone screens
- sends you your password in cleartext via e-mail
- actually complicated to unsubscribe from a list / manage your membership
GP's point is that convenience and long-term thinking don't have to be an either-or. We should have convenient tools that don't require proprietary silos but work well on today's devices and with today's use cases.
The web has horrible usability if you use a text-based browser. I.e. if you use a mail reader with good usability, a mailing list has good usability. This is a client-side issue, not a technology issue.
> - can only participate in conversations via e-mails
Um, yes, a mailing list uses e-mail. I don’t know what you expected.
> - unclear how to participate in / reply to an older thread that wasn't delivered to your mailbox
If you are a new user, and want to reply to a mail you read in the list archive, just write a new mail; there is no strict rule that any discussions must be restricted to one thread.
Indeed, if you want to start a new discussion after some time has elapsed, a new thread may be preferred.
> - NOT accessible, especially in the disabilities sense
Again, this is a client issue. I believe that e-mail is actually the preferred form for those with accessibility needs.
> - doesn't have a search feature; depends on external search engines to crawl the mailing list for discoverability
Somewhat true, but this depends on the list – some list archives do feature search – and is very rarely a problem in practice, since external search engines are very efficient.
> - no responsive design, tiny text and horizontal scrolling on mobile phone screens
Again, a client issue. Get a better e-mail client.
> - sends you your password in cleartext via e-mail
Yes, many lists do this, but this is not a requirement of the technology. Some lists could require all your mails to be signed with PGP or S/MIME; it is entirely up to the list.
> - actually complicated to unsubscribe from a list / manage your membership
Not really. The ”List-Unsubscribe” header is commonly sent in every mail to the list.
But also, part of the problem is the use of email lists. Or rather, specifically, plain text emails, because they contain pre-wrapped lines, and users often assume monospace font. You can try to reflow, but in general it's not possible to determine whether any given line break is there because the line just needed to be wrapped, or because it's actually meaningful (for code, diagram etc).