Once upon a time, Matthew Miller mattdm@fedoraproject.org said:
On Thu, Apr 20, 2023 at 08:24:48PM -0500, Chris Adams wrote:
I have seen this done multiple times over the years, tried to follow a few times, and always dropped off fairly rapidly. I'm solidly in the "email list users" group.
Is there anything which could be different this time which would make it better for you?
I really can't imagine a change for me (and I apologize if that sounds really "grumpy old man"... which I guess it starting to apply to me, since I was in college when a friend told me about some guy in Finland saying "hey Minix people..."). It really comes down to how I use a computer I guess; I am highly keyboard-focused, and I haven't seen a web forum yet that can handle that. Some have a few keyboard shortcuts, but they rarely fill the whole use and often are not well-maintained.
Email lets me have full control of how I consume it. I can sort it my way, save what I want and delete the rest, flag things for more review, etc. Web forums force me to consume their content their way, and then when I maybe have a way to deal with it, they change things. Also, I can easily edit email posts in vi until I get my message the way I want (for example, this paragraph started out as a sentence further down the message :) ).
So for web-based forums and such, they are very casual use for me, where I might drop in occasionally, but mostly just when searching for info. When I've tried web forums before (like when Red Hat killed off their mailing lists), I tend to lose interest and stop going pretty quickly (maybe it's an ADHD thing there, I don't know). I have a bookmark folder of a handful of web forums, and when I look at it, I mostly see sites I haven't visited in months or years.
The only GUI-based communication tools I have stuck with are Slack and Discord, which I can run largely with a keyboard. Even there, I'm only in a small number of servers (Slack is mostly just for work at this point).
I tried loading https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/ in Lynx, but it's way too "busy" to be able to visually browse it, and of course it has the "best viewed with JavaScript enabled" tag, which is usually kiss-of-death for Lynx users (in fact, I couldn't see a way to log in or post/comment).
I'm a small-time packager in Fedora, just a few leaf packages, but I do try to contribute to development discussions based on my experience and use cases. I don't like dropping out of it, but that just feels like the likely outcome.