On Sun, 23 Oct 2022 16:50:30 +0100
Patrick O'Callaghan <pocallaghan(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Many (perhaps all) of the
gnome.org mailing lsits are being moved to
Discourse. This apparently is a decision made by the Gnome Foundation
and has caused a good deal of consternation on at least some of said
lists. I speak mainly for the Evolution list but I think the same is
true on at least some others. Some of the discussion can be seen at:
https://mail.gnome.org/archives/evolution-list/2022-October/thread.html
There are two main points of contention:
1) Most members of these lists were not aware of the coming change
until very recently. I am a moderator of the Evolution list and knew
nothing about it before others.
2) In some ways many of us consider the Discourse platform to be
significantly inferior to a mailing list. It does offer a mailing list
interface but in several respects it is inadequate. I refer you to
this post which goes into some detail:
https://mail.gnome.org/archives/evolution-list/2022-October/msg00276.html
It appears that the
gnome.org is hosted by RedHat, which is a member
of the Gnome Foundation. That being the case, I would like to know if
there is any danger (I use the word advisedly) of this list and others
in the Fedora ecosphere suffering the same fate.
Is this another step of emulating mac/apple behavior? I'm not familiar
enough with the mac ecosystem to know.
Alternatively, this might be meant to cater to people using smart
phones. I'm not sure why that would be relevant to an OS that doesn't
run on phones, but younger people who grew up with smart phones are
tethered to them, and use them as their base for evaluation of what is
worthwhile or not. Perhaps someone at Gnome surmises that they can get
more participation in that demographic by doing this?
A few years ago when Discourse was first introduced to Fedora, I tried
it. It didn't turn my crank, so I am probably one of those people who
would stop actively participating, as mentioned in your second link
above, if mailing lists were to disappear. But perhaps lots of new
people would welcome the change, participate more, and the net change
would be a benefit to fedora. Is there lots of participation on the
discourse platform that already exists? Does it eclipse the
participation on the mailing lists? I imagine that the two communities
are pretty much disjoint, with people expressing their preferred method
of communication by which one they participate in.