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Comment by aldanor | Hacker News Reader

Why mailing lists are still quite massively popular in 2015?..

How would you replace them? ( Please don't say Slack. That is just _not_ a good replacement, especially for projects that needs publicly searchable archives. )

IMHO a publicly/semi-publicly logged irc channel would do just as well, but that's even more oldschool.

The alternative is pretty much only online forums. Which imo. doesn't offer a lot of advantages, and most forum software is exceptionally bad (though yes, a few new and nicer ones are coming along)

Discourse NodeBB and Vanilla comes to mind

None of them appropriately support mailing lists, though. Email-based communication is a big deal for devs which contribute on maybe 5+ projects at once and have to manage comms in one central place.

As for Discourse's mockery of a mailing list mode, let's not even talk about it.

Are you familiar with DFeed [1] used by the D-Lang forum [2]? It is, in my opinion, one of the most usable web frontends for mailing lists (as well as a few other sources).

[1] https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed

[2] http://forum.dlang.org/

Never heard of it. Looks quite good. I will keep an eye on it, thank you.

If you're managing 5+ projects at once, your inbox must be a train-wreck of garbage from these mailing lists.

GitHub has email notifications for issues, but you can opt out of any particular discussion if it gets too pedantic or doesn't relate to you. This helps massively reduce inbox clutter.

The thing that bugs me about mailing lists the most is you get all the email, all the time, forever.

>If you're managing 5+ projects at once, your inbox must be a train-wreck of garbage from these mailing lists.

This is a total non-issue. Mailing lists support daily digests if you want that, and email clients support folders and filters if you want that instead. Nobody managing 5+ mailing list-based projects at once is dumping all of that into an unsorted inbox.

> and email clients support folders and filters if you want that instead.

Because who doesn't like mucking around with their client's filtering?

Ever heard of Sieve? ;)

Ever heard of it's 2015 and I'd like to be able to opt-in to specific mailings if necessary.

Isn't there a decent mailing list package that hybridizes a GitHub "issue" type system with a traditional "email firehose" approach?

I have never used mailing list so I'm probably naive, but what about github issues?

Mailing lists are not just about issue tracking (and really shouldn't be about it). There's general discussion on them, release announcements, etc. pp.

Mattermost is a free and open-source alternative to Slack, giving users publicly searchable archives, great for sending images, files and code in chat. http://www.mattermost.org/

"Why mailing lists are still quite massively popular in 2015?.."

Because (your email client) is always going to be much, much faster and easier to navigate than "some dudes cute forum setup".

Replying to and managing conversations is much easier when you can do it with one or two keystrokes rather than mousey-mousing ten clicks all over the place (and oh their ad tracking js is stalling out again...)

I maintain that all web forums should have a mailing list interface so that you can use the forum without using the web at all ... but I suppose that breaks their revenue model ...

You can look at it this way: They're doing something that people want and which cannot be achieved through other means. What alternatives do you suggest?

(Personally, I use GMANE+NNTP for mailing lists, and NNTP is probably better than plain (public!) mailing lists for most purposes, but unfortunately that ship has sailed.)

> Why mailing lists are still quite massively popular in 2015?..

IRC is still an underused tool in my opinion. The ability to just talk about one issue in a Mail List and keep track of the communication is great. I can't think of another tool that manages communication as well as a mail list (Forums are just not as good in communication notifications like a mail list.)

P.S. I still hate Mail List and don't use them anymore but nothing does it as well right now.

> IRC is still an underused tool in my opinion

IRC, like other chat and IM tools is synchronous. That is useful to get an issue solved quickly. But mailing list are asynchronous. People can think before answering and don't have to be around at the same time. Also threaded nature of mail makes it better to archive discussions and referencing them later. An IRC log is full of other noise and little structure.

Why shouldn't they be?

If I want long-form messages delivered asynchronously, what other choices do I have (forums?) and why are they better than mailing lists? (everyone already has an email client.)

There's no alternative that's even close to that. For me email and IRC work for years and everything is going well.

I have to ask, is the question because you don't understand the value of the communication? There are definitely a type of greenhorn codes that don't and have never worked on anything with the scale to understand it.

Or is it because you value the communication differently than the code? We've evolved distributed revision control to handle issues or geography, connectivity, and work styles effectively allowing you to be self-contained and then collaborate (push, pull, merge someone else's stuff) when you are ready to. Email is the only generally available method of communication that works the same way.

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