Migrate to Mailing Lists to Modern Forum Software

Florian Weimer fw at deneb.enyo.de
Mon Dec 28 10:47:54 UTC 2020


* Andrew Dinn:

> That's just not so. github threads are very different to a mail list, 
> most significantly in the way they are linearized by being presented and 
> continued (by some or, frequently, all parties to a discussion) in a 
> single chain of comments in one browser window. That has a subtle but 
> deeply significant effect on the nature of the discourse, forcing long 
> and complex discussion (ones that regularly, albeit infrequently, happen 
> in this project and often matter the most) into a distorted and 
> hard-to-follow/extend flow. It also has an effect on one's ability to 
> reconstruct a dialogue after the event, which is very important to the 
> project, this being the record of our decision-making process.

On the other hand, few people seem to use (or know of the existence
of) threaded email readers.  For example, I believe the Gmail web
frontend is not thread-based.  Gmail's duplicate suppression (which
can't be switched off) and Mailman's version of it (which is at least
configurable, but often switched on by default) tend to break
threading because of missing messages.

I think that's rather unfortunate because as you write, email
threading is such a useful tool.  But if only a small fraction of
readers actually use it, it's not a strong argument for email as a
communication channel.


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